Danny Quah

Danny Quah is the Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics and Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in income inequality, economic growth, and international economic relations. Quah’s work takes an economic approach to world order — focusing on global power shift and the rise of the east, and alternative models of global power relations. The economic approach emerges in that Quah’s work studies the supply and demand of world order: What international system do the world’s superpowers wish to provide; what world order does the global community need? Quah’s work on income inequality sets the challenge against a broader background of social mobility and cohesion, and in so doing suggests a single narrative on the challenge of income inequality is unlikely to be correct or helpful.

Quah is Commissioner on the Spence-Stiglitz Commission on Global Economic Transformation; and serves on the Executive Committee, International Economic Association; the Executive Committee, Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs APSIA; the Advisory Council, Bennett Institute, Cambridge University; the Academic Advisory Board, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University; the Global Advisory Board, Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management; the Advisory Board, LSE IDEAS; the Advisory Council, OMFIF; the Eminent Advisory Council, UNDP Asia-Pacific; and the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Geopolitics. He is Vice President, Economic Society of Singapore.

Quah gave the third LSE-NUS lecture in 2013, TEDx talks in 2016, 2014, and 2012, and the Inaugural LSE Big Questions Lecture in 2011. Quah’s research has been supported by the Khazanah Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the British Academy, the UK’s Economic and Research Council, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Quah was previously Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, and then at LSE Professor of Economics and International Development, and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. He served as LSE’s Head of Department for Economics, and Council Member on Malaysia’s National Economic Advisory Council.

Quah studied at Princeton, Minnesota, and Harvard.