Page 104 - A Life Well-Lived Is a Beautiful Memory

In Memoriam:

Bhanupong

Nidhiprabha

Prema-chandra Athukorala
15 March 2024 Chandra and Bhanupong at AEP Meeting, Seoul, October 2022

I cherish memories of intimate friendship and intellectual pursuit of over three decades with
Ajarn Bhanupong Nidhiprabha. We first met during his sabbatical in the mid-1990s in the Division
of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University
(ANU). In the ensuing years, we met quite frequently at Asian Economic Panel (AEP) meetings
and other conferences in Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, USA, Finland, South Korea, Japan and

Sweden. During 2002-04, he collaborated with me, Sisira Jayasuriya (Monash University) and the
late Rajesh Mehta (Research Information System, India) in a comparative study of International
Food Safety Standard and Process Food Exports from India and Thailand sponsored by the

Australian Center of International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). This project involved two
research-in-progress workshops in each country under study and a project completion workshop
held at ANU.
Ajarn Bhanupong was the quintessential applied economist with a multidisciplinary
focus on contemporary economic issues encompassing development macroeconomics, trade

and industrialization. He was a valued and much-admired participant of the AEP meetings.
He contributed significantly to uplift the Asian Economic Papers (MIT Press) to the status of a
major scholarly journal dealing with Asian economic affairs through his own contributions and,

more importantly, as an incisive discussant of, and commentator on, papers presented at the
meetings. He contributed several papers to the journal on various facets of economic performance
and international dimensions of the Thai economy including export-oriented industrialization,
adjustment to the shocks of the Indian Ocean tsunami, the global financial crisis, the impact of
the US- China trade war; and the productivity and welfare implications of agricultural subsidies.

As a discussant and commentator, he had a gift for simplifying the complex and clarifying the

104 A Life Well-Lived Is a Beautiful Memory