2000 NZIER Qantas Economics Award

The 2000 NZIER Qantas Economics Award was presented to Professor Peter C B Phillips at the NZIER AGM in Wellington on 20 September 2000for his impressive contribution to the education of economists in New Zealand and his outstanding contribution to economic modelling and econometrics in New Zealand.

Professor Phillip's main research interests are in econometrics, time series, and empirical applications of econometric methods to macroeconomics and finance. In these fields he has achieved an international reputation for excellence. For many years he has had a key role in the education and training of many of New Zealand's best economic modellers and forecasters. He has also been a particularly valuable 'quality control' consultant to a number of New Zealand's major economic modelling projects. In particular he played a major role in the development of the Reserve Bank's RBNZXI I Model of the New Zealand economy introducing the comprehensive use of unit root and cointegration-based techniques to underpin estimation of its long-run relations. At the time, that distinguished the model from previous RBNZ models, and internationally from other working models of significant size.

Although based primarily in the UK and US since1971, for most of the last decade Professor Phillips has spent much of his professional time in New Zealand. He has been elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded that Society's New Zealand Medal in Science and Technology. He has served as the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Economics at Auckland University and as the Programme co-Chair of the New Zealand Econometric Study Group.

NZIER warmly congratulates Professor Phillips. We also express our appreciation for the continued generous support of this award provided by Qantas, the National Business Review, Compaq, Statistics New Zealand, and Signature Travel.