Professor Henry Ergas

Henry Ergas' early career was as a microeconomist at the OECD. There he headed the Secretary-General's Task Force on Structural Adjustment. Between 1991 and 1993 this taskforce concentrated on improving the efficiency of government policies in a wide range of areas. As part of this work, he has examined the design of systems for allocating scarce resources in contexts that go from the allocation of R&D funds, innovation policies as consultant and policy advisor through to the design of congestion charging.

Since leaving the OECD, Henry Ergas' work has focused on competition policy and regulatory economics. He served as Visiting Economic Adviser to the Australian Trade Practices Commission (now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) and has subsequently been involved in a number of significant competition policy cases. He chaired the Australian Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee set up by the Australian Federal Government in 1999 to review Australia's intellectual property laws as they relate to competition policy. In July 2001, Henry Ergas was appointed by the Attorney General of New Zealand as a lay member assisting the New Zealand High Court in cases involving appeals from decisions of the Commerce Commission and in other matters under the Commerce Act. In March 2004, he was appointed as a member of the Australian Centre of Regulatory Economics (ACORE) Advisory Group, which advised the Board on matters pertaining to regulatory activities. He is also Adjunct Professor of Economics at the National University of Singapore.

The appointment of Professor Ergas marks the return to Monash where he had previously held a chair in the Graduate School of Management. Henry Ergas has taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and been a consultant to the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California; an adviser to the Australian Trade Practices Commission (now the ACCC); and a visiting professor at the Centre for Research in Network Economics and Communications at the University of Auckland. He taught at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique in Paris. Currently, Mr Ergas is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the National University of Singapore.

He is Chairman of the newly formed Concept Economics, a new consulting group which was launched on 25 March 2008.