Page 93 - A Life Well-Lived Is a Beautiful Memory

at AEP meetings would first take the paper on its own terms and suggest technical improvements;

and he would then make the paper more useful (and, thus, more cite-able) by broadening its focus
e.g. the authors should have employed the seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE)
method instead of running individual regressions, the authors should expand to the scope of the
paper to include a discussion on the ideological worship of financial market efficiency.

Bhanupong always made time for AEP meetings -- despite frequent great inconvenience to
him in the 2001-2022 period -- because he was a teacher by instinct and a perfectionist in practice.
Bhanupong had the missionary zeal for promoting correct understanding of economic issues. He
was inevitably persuasive because of the rigor of his arguments.

Bhanupong is a most considerate person. He saw the anxieties that I exhibited before each
AEP meeting, and he would seek to put me at ease by coming up with humorous observations or
by paying me the compliment of reminding me about some flippant comments that I had said in
previous AEP meetings.

So, over time, I have added strong affection to the other two feelings I have had about
Bhanupong since April 2001, deep gratitude and high respect. He came, he saw, and he conquered
my problems.
Bhanupong’s intellectual leadership of active and incisive participation in AEP meetings

and his warm personality helped to make AEP meetings a safe place to debate contentious issues
seriously. By being a safe place for personal growth amidst analytical skirmishes, AEP was able
to retain and expand its membership of brilliant policy-oriented economists.
It is my great regret that Bhanupong passed away in May 2023 just before extraordinary

academic recognition was given in June 2023 to AEP’s large pool of deep economic expertise
that he had played an important role in creating. Clavirate – an analytics company that owns
the Web of Science platform and specialises in bibliometrics and scientometrics – computed a
Journal Impact Factor of 9.7 in 2022 for AEP’s journal, Asian Economic Papers (ASEP). This

score placed ASEP as number seven out of the 582 high-quality economics journals evaluated in
the Web of Science.
It is very sad for me that Bhanupong is no longer with us. But as Bhanupong would not
want the world (and AEP) to be weakened by his departure, we should continue the mission that

Bhanupong had devoted his life to, the quest to improve society by comprehending the constantly
changing world correctly in a timely fashion.
Thammasat University and the Asian Economic Panel were two of the vehicles that
Bhanupong had chosen to pursue his goal of making the world a better place. Thammasat is of

course the Big Vehicle and AEP the Little Vehicle. Both vehicles, each with a specialized role,
must continue to move in a mutually reinforcing manner to help carry the world forward on the
Eightfold Path to betterment and fulfillment.

Bhanupong Nidhiprabha 93