Speakers

Professor Christine Wong

Christine Wong is Visiting Research Professor at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore; and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.  She held the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Visiting Chair in International Finance at the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in 2020-2022 and is continuing to teach on the program.

During 2013-2020 Christine was the Founding Director of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne.  Before that she was Director of Chinese Studies and Professor of Chinese Public Finance at the University of Oxford from 2007 to 2013, and Henry M. Jackson Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington during 2000-2007.  She has also taught economics at the University of California campuses in Santa Cruz and Berkeley; and Mount Holyoke College.

An international authority on China’s public finance and public sector reform, Christine has held senior staff positions in the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.  She has also been a consultant for the IMF, OECD, and UNDP.  She is a member of the OECD Advisory Panel on Budgeting and Public Expenditures and the Academic Advisory Board at the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance at Tsinghua University.

Professor Wong has published widely on China’s public finance and public sector reform.  Her research focuses especially on the impact of fiscal decentralization on policy implementation in education, health, social welfare, environmental protection, and urbanization.