Profile: Robert Mundell, Nobel-winning economist and "father of euro"

2021-04-06 02:36:06 GMT2021-04-06 10:36:06(Beijing Time) Xinhua English

FRANKFURT, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Robert Mundell, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is also known as the "father of the euro", died in Italy on Sunday at the age of 88, according to reports from Italian news agency ANSA and other major local media.

The Canadian-born economist was best known for laying the theoretical groundwork for the euro in the 1960s. He was also an advocate of supply-side economics.

Mundell won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999 for what the Nobel Committee referred to as "his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas." The creation of the euro has been frequently cited as a case study for the optimum currency areas theory.

Mundell was born on Oct. 24, 1932 in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

In 1953, he received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of British Columbia and his master's degree from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1954.

He also studied at the London School of Economics, before earning his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.

After completing his post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago in 1957, he began teaching at Stanford University.

During his decades-long academic career, Mundell served at a number of world-famous universities and institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, the University of Waterloo, and McGill University. Since 1974, he had been professor of economics at Columbia University. He also joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009 as distinguished professor-at-large.

In 1961, he joined the staff of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). During the IMF years, he published important research on the exchange rate and theory of international economics. Later in his career, he had been adviser to the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the Canadian government.

Mundell visited China many times. He also called for the Chinese currency to be included in the basket of the Special Drawing Rights regime of the IMF. The yuan was granted that status in 2016. Enditem

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