Page 92 - A Life Well-Lived Is a Beautiful Memory
P. 92
The Painful Loss
of My Friend,
Bhanupong
Nidhiprabha
Wing Thye Woo
15 April 2024
I met Bhanupong Nidhiprabha for the first time on April 26, 2001 at the inaugural meeting
of the Asia Economic Panel (AEP). The meeting was held at the Sheraton Commander Hotel
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because the Center of International Development at Harvard
University was then one of the three sponsoring members of AEP. The other two sponsors of this
new forum were the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy and the Global Security
Research Center at Keio University.
The fact is that even before I met Bhanupong, I had already felt indebted to him for his kind
willingness to travel half-way round to support this new mendicant academic venture that could
not afford to cover business class travel or to pay him an honorarium. My gratitude was deep
because he made this sacrifice for someone whom he had not met before, and certainly never
heard of before.
At this first AEP meeting, Bhanupong was the discussant of the paper “Bank Restructuring
in Post-Crisis Asia” by Donald Hanna and Yiping Huang. Bhanupong helped to set the high
analytical standard for subsequent AEP meetings to come when he did a brilliant job in identifying
the weaknesses in the paper and making constructive suggestions for improvements.
High respect for Bhanupong was hence naturally added to pre-existing feeling of my deep gratitude
to him. As I was young then, the combination of awe and shyness inhibited me from exchanging
more than greetings with Bhanupong at our first meeting in 2001.
Bhanupong went on to become an indispensable pillar of the AEP setup through his
intellectual leadership on the big economic issues of the day (e.g. the Global Financial Crisis, and
the US-China Trade War) by presenting insightful papers and delivering trenchant comments on
the papers by others. Like the best analysts, the trademark of Bhanupong’s comments on papers
92 A Life Well-Lived Is a Beautiful Memory
