Professor Tony Fang of York’s School of Human Resource Management has been elected president of the Chinese Economist Society (CES), the first Canadian PhD holder to do so since the founding of the society in New York in 1985.
Fang will serve as president-elect for one year, starting September 2011. He will then serve as president for another year, until September 2013. The CES is a professional, non-profit academic association with more than 2,000 members from universities, government agencies, international organizations, industrial firms and financial services throughout Canada, the United States, Asia, Europe and other regions. It also publishes the academic journal China Economic Review.
Left: Tony Fang
Fang has long been affiliated with the CES and was elected as a member to the CES Board of Directors from 2007 to 2008. “Personally, I benefited enormously from my involvement in various professional activities in the CES and welcome the opportunity to pass it on to others,” says Fang, who teaches in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.
As the next CES president, Fang is in good company. Past presidents have included Justin Yifu Lin, the vice-governor and chief economist at World Bank; Gang Yi, vice-governor of the Bank of China; and Wen Hai, vice-president of Peking University.
“Thanks to the dedication and exemplary leadership of the past presidents and the Board of Directors, the society has gained an exceptional reputation and made remarkable contributions to the advancement of economics and management sciences in China and abroad,” says Fang, who was awarded the title of “Chutian Scholar” of Hubei Province in 2010. “Many of our senior members have successfully promoted scholarly exchanges, economic growth and social development.”
Fang hopes to further advance the professional impact and contributions of the CES, expand the membership base and assist young scholars to advance their professional careers through various networking, funding and publication opportunities. He would also like to build bridges between economic research, management practices and policy development, and encourage interdisciplinary and collaborative research in various fields of economics, management and policy studies both in China and overseas.
The president is responsible for organizing two major conferences a year, one in China and one in North America, as well as sessions at the American Economic Association Annual conference and a Gregory Chow Teaching Fellowship Program, funded by the Ford Foundation. “I am proposing the 2013 North American conference to be held at York University in Toronto to enhance the visibility and prestige of York,” says Fang.
Fang also serves as the domain leader in economic and labour market integration at CERIS – Ontario Metropolis Centre and is a faculty associate at the York Centre for Asian Research. His areas of research interest encompass issues of compensation and benefits, high performance workplace practices, pension, retirement policy and the ageing workforce, education, immigration and minimum wages, union impact on wages, innovation and firm growth, pay equity and employment equity.
He has been published in several journals, including Industrial Relations, the Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Journal of Labor Research, the International Journal of Manpower, Social Indictors Research and Perspectives on Labour and Income.
The CES aims to promote market-based economic reforms and open-door policies in China, as well as to expand academic exchanges between China and the outside world and to engage in scholarly studies of the Chinese economy. In 1992, the CES has been a member of the Allied Social Science Association. Since 1993, CES has organized one international conference in China annually to spearhead new reforms and help governments formulate reform and development strategies.
For more information, visit the Chinese Economist Society website.