Summary
David Begg is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School.
From 2003 until 2012, he was Principal of the Business School. During this period, the School was transformed, doubling in size and recruiting faculty from many of the world’s leading universities, launching new programmes in Finance, Marketing, and Innovation management, and tripling research income. In 2008 the School beat both Oxford and Cambridge in the nationwide assessment of research excellence. The School rose 50 places in the Financial Times ranking of the top 100 MBA programmes in the world. David also played an active role in fund raising, most notably in securing a £20m donation to found the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis.
During 2003-12 David also served on the Management Board of Imperial College and during 2011-12 acted as Pro-Rector for Research for the College. Prior to joining Imperial, David acted as Vice Master of Birkbeck College London and for many years was head of its Economics Department. His first academic job was as an economics lecturer at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Economics at Worcester College Oxford. He holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a Kennedy Scholar, an MPhil from Oxford University, and an MA from Cambridge University where he won the Adam Smith prize.
David’s research interests are monetary and exchange rate policy, asset pricing, transition economies, and macroeconomics more generally. He was a founding Managing Editor of the journal Economic Policy which is now ranked as the highest impact policy in Europe for economic policy. He has advised the Bank of England, HM Treasury, the IMF, the European Commission, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the central banks of Hungary and the then Czechoslovakia.
In 1984 David published the textbook Economics, co-authored with MIT professors Stanley Fischer and Rudiger Dornbusch, which overnight became the leading introductory economics textbook in Europe and beyond. Now in its 12th edition, it has spawned separate French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, and Canadian editions, totalling almost two million sales. Alongside other classics such as Gray’s Anatomy, it was featured in the BBC Radio 4 series Student Bibles.
In 2012 David was appointed a Non-Executive Director of the technology commercialisation company Imperial Innovations, and subsequently became Senior Independent Director of IP Group which remains one of the UK’s most important source of funding and management for technology start up firms drawing on deep science.
Publications
Books
Begg, D.K.H., Blanchard, O., Coyle, D., et al., 2003, The consequences of saying no: an independent report into the economic consequences of the UK saying no to the Euro, London, Britain in Europe Campaign Ltd, ISBN:9781903565209
Begg, D.K.H., Fischer, S., Dornbusch, R., 2003, Foundations of economics, London, McGraw-Hill Education, ISBN:9780077099855
Begg, D.K.H., Fischer, S., Dornbusch, R., 2003, Economics, London, McGraw-Hill, ISBN:9780077099473
Begg, D.K.H., Ward, D., 2003, Economics for business, London, McGraw-Hill, ISBN:9780077104290
Begg, D.K.H., De Grauew, P., Canova, F., et al., 2002, Surviving the slowdown (Monitoring the European Central Bank S.), London, Centre for Economic Policy Research, ISBN:9781898128656