Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Trade and Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former head of the IMF’s China Division.
Prasad’s new book, Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi, will be published by Oxford University Press in October 2016. He is also the author of The Dollar Trap: How the U.S. Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance (Princeton University Press, 2014) and Emerging Markets: Resilience and Growth Amid Global Turmoil (with M. Ayhan Kose; Brookings Institution Press, 2010). His extensive publication record includes articles in numerous collected volumes as well as top academic journals such as the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, The Economic Journal, International Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of International Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. He has co-authored and edited numerous books and monographs, including on financial regulation and on China and India. His current research interests include the macroeconomics of financial globalization; financial regulation, monetary policy frameworks, and exchange rate policies in emerging markets; and the Chinese and Indian economies.
Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Trade and Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former head of the IMF’s China Division.
Prasad’s new book, Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi, will be published by Oxford University Press in October 2016. He is also the author of The Dollar Trap: How the U.S. Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance (Princeton University Press, 2014) and Emerging Markets: Resilience and Growth Amid Global Turmoil (with M. Ayhan Kose; Brookings Institution Press, 2010). His extensive publication record includes articles in numerous collected volumes as well as top academic journals such as the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, The Economic Journal, International Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of International Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. He has co-authored and edited numerous books and monographs, including on financial regulation and on China and India. His current research interests include the macroeconomics of financial globalization; financial regulation, monetary policy frameworks, and exchange rate policies in emerging markets; and the Chinese and Indian economies.
Prasad has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and his research on China has been cited in the U.S. Congressional Record. He was a member of the analytical team that drafted the 2008 report of the High-Level Committee on Financial Sector Reforms set up by the Government of India and is Lead Academic for the DFID-LSE International Growth Center’s India Growth Research Program. He is the creator of the Brookings-Financial Times world index (TIGER: Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery; www.ft.com/tiger).
His op-ed articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal Asia, and Washington Post. He has made frequent appearances on BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox, NBC, NPR, PBS, Reuters, and other radio and television channels.
Prasad is also a Research Fellow at IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn). He has served as the co-editor of the journal IMF Staff Papers, was on the editorial board of Finance & Development and was the founding editor of the quarterly IMF Research Bulletin.
After years of asking China to become a more market-driven economy, the Trump administration would be explicitly asking the Chinese to set aside market forces when it comes to exchange-rate determination. ... That’s a worrying precedent.
Even if China were to provide greater access to its markets today, if the U.S. economy were to do well, and China were to slow down, the deficit might actually increase...It would certainly be problematic to view the size of that deficit as an indicator of whether trade is fair.
The [International Monetary] Fund has become more willing to question its own longstanding orthodoxy, and is more open to trying alternative approaches to crises. [However,] the Fund still remains politically toxic for leaders in Asia.
