Crawford School of Public Policy

Crawford School’s Professor Renee Fry-McKibbin has been successful in this week’s ARC funding announcements.

The ARC Linkage programs aim to help build partnerships between researchers and industry, government and community organisations as well as the international community.

Professor Fry-McKibbin, Associate Dean Research in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, will lead a new research program which will examine the effectiveness of economic diplomacy in contributing to Australia’s export and inflow of foreign investment.

In collaboration with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) the project, titled Economic Diplomacy and National Prosperity will develop a dataset to capture characteristics of Australia’s diplomatic sector, export and foreign direct investment.

The project aims to inform DFAT’s resource allocation, risk management and to assist advocacy in the public domain on trade and investment issues.

“I am very excited to team up with DFAT to look at the issue of economic diplomacy and to understand the contribution that Australia’s presence in foreign countries makes to our economic wellbeing,” Professor Fry-McKibbin said.

“It is a good thing for DFAT to try to understand how this process works, as it will be a useful input into decisions about where best to locate our diplomatic resources in order to best help Australians do business internationally.”

Professor Fry-McKibbin, of the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at Crawford School, researches macroeconomic modelling, models of financial market crisis and contagion currency market intervention and commodity economics time series analysis.

The project will receive funding of A$110,000 and will be undertaken over a two year period.