Editorial Board

Professor Terry Anderson, Hoover Institution (Stanford)
Professor Wilfred Beckerman, Oxford University
Professor Ian Castles, Australian National University
Mr. Michael De Alessi, Reason Foundation
Professor Bibek Debroy, International Management Institute, Delhi
Professor Pierre Desrochers, University of Toronto
Professor Xingyuan Feng, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Professor Eugenio Figueroa, University of Chile
Professor Cay Folkers, University of Bochum
Professor Tom de Gregori, University of Houston
Professor Hannes Gissurarson, University of Iceland
Professor Wolfgang Kaspar, University of New South Wales
Professor Martin Krause, ESEADE, Buenos Aires
Professor Hansjörg Küster, University of Hanover
Professor Andrew Morriss, University of Illinois
Sir Alan Peacock, David Hume Institute
Dr. Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University
Professor C. S. Prakash, Tuskegee University
Professor Paul Reiter, Pasteur Institute
Professor Colin Robinson, University of Surrey
Professor Charles T. Rubin, Duquesne University
Professor Mark Sagoff, University of Maryland
Professor Douglas Southgate, Ohio State University
Professor David Schmidtz, University of Arizona
Professor David S. Schoenbrod, New York Law School and Cato Institute
Professor Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago
Professor Anthony Trewavas, University of Edinburgh
Professor Dr. Erich Weede, University of Bonn
Professor Wang Xingbo, Capital University of Business and Economics
Professor Bruce Yandle, Clemson University

Biographies

Professor Terry Anderson the executive director of PERC - the Property and Environment Research Center, a non-profit institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through markets; Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and Professor Emeritus at Montana State University. His work helped launch the idea of “free market environmentalism” with the publication of his book by that title, co-authored with Donald Leal. Professor Anderson is the author or editor of 30 books and has published widely in both professional journals and the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and Fly Fisherman. His book with P. J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West (Stanford University Press, 2004), was awarded the 2005 Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award. He received his B.S. from the University of Montana in 1968 and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington in 1972, after which he began his teaching career at Montana State University where he has won several teaching awards. Professor Anderson is an avid outdoorsman and a skilled bow hunter with a passion for hunting in Africa.

Wilfred Beckerman is an Emeritus Fellow of Economics at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Professor Beckerman is the author of many academic articles, which have appeared in such publications as Oxford Economic Papers, The Review of Economic Studies, Economica and many others, as well as several books including In Defence of Economic Growth (Jonathan Cape, 1974), Small is Stupid (Elsevier, 1995) and most recently Justice, Posterity and the Environment, with J. Pasek (Oxford, 2001). From 1952-64 Professor Beckerman served as an economic advisor and Head of Division of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development as well as Director of Research at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Professor Beckerman has served on Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and chaired the UK Department of the Environment’s Advisory Panel of Academic Economists from 1992-96. His teaching career has included posts at Balliol College, and a Professorship at University College, London.

Professor Ian Castles is currently a Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. He was formerly Australian Statistician (1986-94) and Secretary, Australian Department of Finance (1979-86). After his retirement from the Australian Public Service in 1994 he was successively Executive Director and Vice President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1995-2000). Professor Castles is a former President of the International Association of Official Statistics and was elected a Member of the International Statistical Institute in 1992. His research interests include: the information requirements of public policy, economic growth and the environment, global distribution of income and output, and the history of economic thought. He has been critical of the standard of statistical reporting of several international organisations. His most recent projects include a review of emissions scenarios by the intergovernmental panel on climate change and a book entitled The Tasmanian Economists (with William Coleman ANU; Alf Hagger and Michael Roe, University of Tasmania; and Selwyn Cornish, ANU).

Michael De Alessi is Director of Natural Resource Policy for the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. He specializes in water policy, marine conservation and wildlife issues, focusing on developing private-sector solutions to these issues, and is former director of the Centre for Private Conservation. He received a B.A. in Economics and an M.S. in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University and an M.A. in Marine Policy from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. He is the author of Fishing for Solutions (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998) and co-editor of Marine Resources: Property Rights, Economics and Environment (Elsevier, 2002). His articles have appeared in such publications as New Scientist, Journal of Commerce, International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal Europe and The Asian Wall Street Journal.

Bibek Debroy is a professor at the International Management Institute, Delhi . Previously, he served as Research Director at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, New Delhi. He is a professional economist and was educated in Presidency College, Calcutta; Delhi School of Economics; and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Mr. Debroy’s is particular interests are in the areas of trade, law and the political economy of reforms. He has worked at Presidency College, Calcutta; Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune; the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi; National Council of Applied Economic Research, Delhi; and as a consultant to the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, India. He was also the director of a project known as LARGE, set up by the Ministry of Finance and UNDP to examine legal reforms. He is the author of several books, papers and popular articles and is also Consulting Editor with Business Standard.

Pierre Desrochers is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. His work includes research into economic development, technological innovation and business-environment interactions. He is also Book Review Editor of the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development. Previously-held positions include Post-doctoral Fellow, W.P. Carey Programs on Entrepreneurship and Management, at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland; and Research Director at the Montreal Economic Institute, Quebec. Professor Desrochers holds a PhD and a BA from the University of Montreal, and an MA from the National Institute of Scientific Research. He is the author of over 20 academic articles and more than 100 columns, op-eds and popular pieces, published in journals such as the Review of Austrian Economics, Environmental Politics, and the Journal of Industrial Ecology. His full CV is available here.

Professor Eugenio Figueroa is executive director of the Chilean National Center for the Environment, and director of the Center of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (CENRE). He is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chile. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Marketing, Business Economics and Law at the University of Alberta’s School of Business. One of 24 scientific members of the Committee for Development Policy that advises the UN, he is a current or past economic adviser to governments, institutions and companies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and America, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and development agencies in Germany, Japan, and Chile, among other countries.

Cay Folkers is the Professor of Public Finance, Department of Economics, at the Ruhr University of Bochum. His primary interests are the study of public finance, public choice and constitutional economics. He was educated at the University of Hamburg and the Free University of Berlin, and has held teaching positions at the University of Hamburg and the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart. Previously held positions include Visiting Professor at George Mason University, Virginia, and he has worked with the EU-TEMPUS projects “Fiscal Federalism” and “Public Finance in the Post-Communist State”. Professor Folkers is a member of the American Economic Association, a non-profit association which encourages economic research, and of the Public Choice Society. He is also Chairman of the Board at the German Taxpayers’ Union, Dusseldorf.

Hannes Gissurarson is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Iceland. He was born in 1953. After completing degrees in philosophy and history at the University of Iceland, he received a D. Phil. in politics at the Faculty of Social Studies at the University of Oxford in 1985. He has been Professor of Politics in the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Iceland since 1988. The author of 15 books, he served as an advisor to the David Oddsson government from 1991-2004 and is a member of the governing board of the Central Bank of Iceland. Recent publications include Tax Competition. An Opportunity for Iceland? (David Brown Book Company, 2001), which he co-edited with T. Herbertsson, and Overfishing. The Icelandic Solution (Institute of Economic Affairs, 2000). He has written many articles and essays, for the Wall Street Journal and various Icelandanic newspapers and journals.

Thomas de Gregori is a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, and a member of the Founder’s Circle of the American Council on Science and Health. He is on the board of directors or editorial board of a number of journals and scholarly associations. He is widely published: his most recent books include Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate; The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology; Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defence (all from Blackwell; and Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety and the Environment (from the Cato Institute). Other publications include a number of monographs and lengthy reports for development agencies, numerous refereed articles in books, scholarly journals and online, many conferences, and book reviews for both academic and popular audiences.

Wolfgang Kasper is an emeritus Professor of Economics of the University of New South Wales. From 1977 to 1999, he was the foundation Professor of Economics on the University's Defence Force Academy campus in Canberra, and from 1999 to 2006 he served as a Senior Fellow of the Centre of Independent Studies (CIS), a Sydney-based free-market think tank. Professor Kasper has worked for of the German Council of Economic Advisors, the Kiel Institute of World Economics, the OECD in Paris, and the Federal Reserve of San Francisco, and as an advisor to the Malaysian Minister of Finance. He has a long record of research and consulting for international business and governments, both in mature economies and Asia-Pacific countries. He has written widely on institutions and institutional change –– the role of private property rights, freedom of contract and small, rule-bound government in promoting prosperity. He has authored some 20 monographs and over 200 articles, and contributes occasional articles to Australian and overseas newspapers. Kasper has been elected a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international academy, and serves on the Presidium of the Centre for the New Europe, a free-market think tank in Brussels, as well as the Academic Advisory Board of the CIS.

Professor Martin Krause earned his PhD. in Management Sciences from Universidad Católica de La Plata, in 1978. Since then he has been involved mainly in academic and consulting activities related to economics. In 1998 he was selected as a Professor of Economics at the Law School, University of Buenos Aires. He is also a professor of Institutional Economics and Business Economics and a professor of Institutional Economics and Public Policy at the ESEADE Graduate School (Escuela Superior de Economía y Administración de Empresas), and was appointed Dean in 2002. He is a Visiting Professor of Economics at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. He also teaches a course on austrian economics at the School of Economics, University of Buenos Aires. He is a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and has been awarded with several prizes and fellowships such as the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships in 1993 and the Freedom Project from the John Templeton Foundation in 1999 and 2000. He has participated as a speaker and lecturer in many seminars and conferences, and as an international observer to elections in many countries around the world. He has published several books, including: Economía para emprendedores, En Defensa de los Más Necesitados y Proyectos por una Sociedad Abierta (together with Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr and Democracia Directa (together with Margarita Molteni), chapters in books and many articles in academic journals and magazines and newspapers all over Latin America.

Professor Hansjörg Küster was born in Frankfurt/Main in 1956, and studied Biology at University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart. Between 1981 and 1998 he worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Munich, in the working group for vegetation history. Since 1998, Professor Küster has been the Professor for Plant Ecology at the Institute for Geobotany at Hannover University. Since 2004, he has served as President of the Lower Saxonian Heritage Association. His main fields of interest are plant ecology, vegetation history, landscape history, and the history of cultivated plants.

Andrew P. Morriss is the inaugural H. Ross and Helen Workman Professor of Law & Professor of Business at the University of Illinois. He is also a Research Fellow of the NYU Center for Labor and Employment Law, a Senior Fellow at the Property & Environment Research Center, Bozeman, Montana; a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; and a regular visiting professor at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala. Prior to coming to the University of Illinois, he served as Galen J. Roush Professor of Business Law and Regulation at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, where he was also associate dean from 2000 to 2003. He is the author or co-author of more than forty book chapters and scholarly articles, in journals such as Administrative Law Review. He is the co-editor of several publications, including The Common Law and the Environment, with Roger Meiners (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). His book on Regulation by Litigation (with Bruce Yandle and Andrew Dorchak) is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Professor Morriss was recently named a Senior Fellow for the Houston-based Institute for Energy Research (IER), which conducts historical research and evaluates public policies in the oil, gas, coal, and electricity markets.

Brought up in Dundee and now living in Edinburgh, Sir Alan Peacock has been a sailor, professor of economics in four major universities , Chief Economic Adviser to the UK Department of Trade and Industry (1973-76) and Vice Chancellor (President) of the UK's only independent university, Buckingham. He has published widely on the economics of public finance and latterly on the political economy of culture , but still had time to act as a consultant to international agencies (including the IMF, the OECD, and the UN), governments and professional organizations. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Medallist of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 84 years of age and allegedly retired , he still takes an active part in contemporary economics debates , one of his main interests being critical appraisal of policies designed to achieve sustainable development. He co-founded The David Hume Institute, Edinburgh, and served as its first Executive Director.

Dr. Benny Peiser is on the science faculty of Liverpool John Moores University, with a particular research interest in human and cultural evolution. His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of Spaceguard UK. He has written extensively on neo-catastrophism and the potential risk posed by near-Earth objects. Dr. Peiser is the editor of CCNet, an electronic science and science policy network with more than 5,000 subscribers from around the world. It is in this capacity that a 10km-wide asteroid, Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, was named in his honour by the International Astronomical Union. He is a member of the editorial board of Energy & Environment and a scientific advisor to the Lifeboat Foundation. His recent work includes From local disaster to global cataclysm: The magnification of natural catastrophes in ancient thought and contemporary science, a paper presented at an international workshop on “The Impact of Natural Catastrophes on Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations” in 2005.

Channapatna S. Prakash is Professor in Plant Molecular Genetics and the Director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University, Alabama. He oversees the research on food crops of importance to developing countries and the training of scientists and students in plant biotechnology. Professor Prakash has also been actively involved in enhancing the societal awareness of food biotechnology issues around the world. His website has become an important portal disseminating information and promoting discussion on this subject among stakeholders such as scientists, policy makers, activists and journalists. He has served on the USDA's Agricultural Biotechnology Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee for the Department of Biotechnology for the government of India. Professor Prakash has actively worked to promote biotechnology research and policy in developing countries of Asia and Africa through the training of students and scholars, research collaboration and lectures. He was named among the 'Top 100 Living Contributors to Biotechnology' by his peers in a survey by The Scientist magazine and Reed Exhibitions. Professor Prakash has a bachelors degree in agriculture and a masters degree in genetics, and obtained his Ph.D. in forestry/genetics from the Australian National University, Canberra.

Paul Reiter is a professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He is a specialist in the biology, ecology, behaviour and control of mosquitoes, and the transmission dynamics and epidemiology of the diseases they transmit. He worked for 22 years as a Research Scientist at the Division of Vector-borne Infectious Diseases of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with special interest in dengue, West Nile encephalitis and other arboviral diseases. During that period, he headed field investigations of disease outbreaks in many countries around the world on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the US Government, Operation Lifeline Sudan and other organizations. In 2003 he was appointed Professor at the Institute Pasteur, Paris, where he directs a new unit of Insects and Infectious Disease. He is a member the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control, and has served on many other international committees and work groups. He has a long-standing interest in the role of weather and climate in epidemiology, and has been actively involved in the international debate on climate change for more than 12 years. He has served as consultant and lead author for the US Climate Change Research Program (Health Section), and on other national and international panels.

Professor Colin Robinson worked for eleven years as a business economist, mainly in the oil industry, before being appointed in 1968 to the Chair of Economics at the University of Surrey, where he founded the Department of Economics and is now Emeritus Professor. He is the sole or joint author of 25 books and monographs and about 160 journal papers, including studies of the international oil, coal and gas markets, North Sea oil and gas, nuclear energy in Britain, British energy policy and various aspects of energy industry regulation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, of the Society of Business Economists and of the Institute of Energy. He was named British Institute of Energy Economics `Economist of the Year’ in 1992 and in 1998 received from the International Association for Energy Economics its `Outstanding Contribution to the Profession and its Literature’ award. From 1992 to 2002 he was Editorial Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs and he is a member of the IEA`s Academic Advisory Council.

Charles Rubin, Associate Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University, has research interests in the areas of the impact of technological change, ethics and public policy, literature and politics, political philosophy, and urban design. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from Western Reserve College, and a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Boston College. Recent areas of research include: artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and transhumanism, a comparative study of Pittsburgh, PA and Portland, OR neighborhoods, the problem of applying the precautionary principle to measures dealing with Earth/asteroid collisions, conceptual flaws in the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the writings of Neal Stephenson, Henry Adams and Flannery O’Conner. Professor Rubin serves on the Board of Advisors of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy Research and is a consulting editor for Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Professor Rubin’s book The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism appeared in 1994. More recently, he became editor of Conservation Reconsidered: Nature, Virtue and American Liberal Democracy. Rowman and Littlefield publish both books. He is currently at work on Why Be Human? Defending Progress Against Its Friends.

Professor Mark Sagoff is Acting Director and Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has published widely in journals of law, philosophy, and the environment. His books include The Economy of the Earth (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Price, Principle, and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He was named a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 and awarded a Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1998. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Sagoff has an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. (Philosophy) from Rochester, and taught at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), and Cornell before coming to the University of Maryland.

David Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy, and joint Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona. Professor Schmidtz has authored many books, including the recent Elements of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and is co-editor of Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, with Elizabeth Willott (Oxford University Press, 2002). His essays have been published in journals such as Ethics, Environmental Values and Political Theory. He is world-renowned in moral theory and law, having written on such diverse topics as the limits of government, individual responsibility and moral theory, and most recently on the elements of justice. He has also written articles of particular interest to the legal academy on the institution of property, environmental ethics, and rational choice. Before returning to the University of Arizona, where he had earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy, Professor Schmidtz was a member of the faculties at Bowling Green State University and Yale University, and he has enjoyed visiting appointments at such academic institutions as Australian National Univeristy, the University of British Columbia, Kansas State University and the University of North Carolina.

David Schoenbrod is Trustee Professor of Law, New York Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A pioneer in the field of environmental law, David Schoenbrod was at the forefront of environmental justice. As staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) during the 1970s, he led the charge to get lead out of gasoline, helping to dramatically reduce the amount of the brain-damaging contaminant in the air. Professor Schoenbrod frequently contributes to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other newspapers and periodicals. Professor Schoenbrod asserts in his scholarship that Congress has inappropriately shifted its responsibility for the laws to regulatory agencies and courts. In 2005, Yale released his new book, Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People. He has also published articles in scholarly journals on environmental law, remedies, and the law and politics of regulation. Professor Schoenbrod’s academic career includes positions at Yale Law School (1977) and New York University School of Law (1979–84). He also coauthored A New Direction in Transit with Ross Sandler, - a plan to renovate the city’s subway system that was endorsed by all the city’s major newspaper editorial boards and ultimately adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

A natural resource economist with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Professor Douglas Southgate has been at Ohio State University since 1980. His research focuses on the causes of tropical deforestation, the economics of watershed management, and related environmental issues in the developing world and he has written three books and more than 50 journal articles and scholarly papers on these topics. Fluent in Spanish, Professor Southgate has worked in fourteen Latin American and Caribbean countries for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Ford Foundation. He also has directed his university's Latin American Studies Program and Center for International Studies.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, Law School and Department of Political Science, at the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. Before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of the Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, including Ukraine, Poland, China, South Africa, and Russia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Sunstein has been Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia, visiting professor of law at Harvard, vice-chair of the ABA Committee on Separation of Powers and Governmental Organizations, and chair of the Administrative Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Sunstein is a member of the Department of Political Science as well as the Law School. He is author of many articles and a number of books, including Why Societies Need Dissent (Harvard University Press, 2003), and Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He is now working on various projects involving the relationship between law and human behaviour.

Professor Anthony Trewavas has for the last fourteen years held the Chair in Plant Biochemistry at the University of Edinburgh where he leads a team of over thirty researchers and graduates. He has held posts at the University of East Anglia and University College, London, and regularly lectures to academic audiences around the world. His specialist area of research is molecular signalling in plants. Over 200 of his papers have been published in scientific journals and he has written two books. But he enjoys practical agriculture too, and is a member of LEAF’s Scottish Advisory Board. His researches have also left him with trenchant views on organic farming.

Professor Erich Weede, born 1942, taught sociology at the University of Bonn until his retirement in fall 2004. He has produced more than 200 publications in German or English, among them 11 books. His topics concern war, the rise and decline of nations, Asian civilizations, economic growth and income inequality. His books include Economic Development, Social Order and World Politics (Lynne Rienner, 1996) and The Balance of Power, Globalization, and the Capitalist Peace (for the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation, Liberal Verlag, Berlin 2005). He also serves as a member of the editorial boards of several other scientific journals, including International Interactions, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Korea and World Affairs. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Hayek-Gesellschaft.

Wang Xinbo is Associate Professor at Capital University of Economics and Business (CUEB), Beijing, China, and co-director of the China Sustainable Development Research Center at CUEB. He is a Ph.D candidate in the graduate school of China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and earned an MA in economics in 1988. He has worked in the CASS Institute for Industrial Economics, and the Unirule Institute of Economics in Beijing, and he is now an honorary research fellow of the Institute. His paper “Rethinking the nature of the firm” was published in China’s most authoritative academic economics journal Jingji yanjiu (Economic Research) in 1992, and it was republished in a collection of papers on new institutional economics in 2003 by Beijing University Press. Recently, his academic research has focused on natural resources and environmental economics, from an institutional perspective. His working papers has included “A pricing mechanism for water supply projects” (2004) for Chinese Ministry of Water Resources; and “Urban water price formation and regulation” for the Chinese Ministry of Construction (2005). He is currently working as a consultant for JICA on China’s water rights program. He is fascinated by China’s process of institutional transition and frequently contributes articles to Chinese newspapers.

Feng Xingyuan is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Associate Research Fellow at the Rural Development Institute. He is a co-founder and board member of the Cathay Institute for Public Affairs, as well as co-founder and member of the Chinese Hayek Society. He is a member of many organisations and associations such as the National Association of Promoting the County and Township Development, and the Committee of Agriculture and Forestry of Jiusan Society (a democratic party in China), the Association of German Studies, and the Association of European Studies. His research focuses on economic and social order, and he is an expert in the study of the Austrian School of Economics, the Freiburger School of Economics and Constitutional Economics. He has authored a number of books such as The EMU and the Euro (China Youth Press, May 1999), and Reducing Regional Disparities in the EU and Germany (China Labor and Social Security Press, 2002). Feng Xingyuan has also co-authored the book The European Constitution Making and Implication for China and published dozens of newspaper articles and journals in China and abroad. He is also editor-in-chief of a new book series called the Theory of Order and Economics.

Bruce Yandle is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at Clemson University and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He has served in government on two occasions, first as Senior Eonomist on the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability and later as Executive Director of the Federal Trade Commission. He is on the editorial board of the European Journal of Law & Economics, is a Senior Fellow with the PERC - the Property and Environment Research Center of Bozeman, Montana, and is author or editor of 14 books on regulation and environmental policy.