About The Authors

Christopher T. S. Ragan • Dr. Richard G. Lipsey

Christopher T. S. Ragan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at McGill University in Montreal. From January 2009 through June 2010, he is the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at the Department of Finance in Ottawa where he serves as a senior advisor to the Minister and other senior Finance officials. In the 2004–2005 academic year, he served as the Special Advisor to the Governor of the Bank of Canada, also in Ottawa.

Since his appointment to McGill in 1989, Ragan has taught a wide variety of courses at undergraduate and graduate levels, and in 2007 he was awarded the Noel Fieldhouse teaching prize in the Faculty of Arts. His passion for teaching extends to his writing. Ragan is the co-author with Richard Lipsey of Economics, which after twelve editions is the most widely used introductory economics textbook in Canada. A version of the same textbook has recently been re-introduced into the U.S. market.

Ragan's academic research deals mainly with the role of economic policy, most recently the objectives and conduct of monetary policy. He has published several articles in economics journals including Economica, Labour Economics, Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Canadian Business Economics, Policy Options, and the Bank of Canada Review. In 2004, he co-edited the book Is the Debt War Over? Dispatches from Canada's Fiscal Frontline with his McGill colleague William Watson. In the fall of 2007 he published his most recent book, The Canadian Priorities Agenda, co-edited with two colleagues from the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Economic Affairs, and for two years he had a regular column in National Post Business, a popular Canadian magazine of business affairs. He now has a regular column in the Montreal Gazette and has occasional columns in the National Post. Ragan also teaches microeconomics regularly for McKinsey & Company, a leading international management consulting firm.

Ragan received his BA (Honours) in economics in 1984 from the University of Victoria and his MA in economics from Queen's University in 1985. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he completed his PhD in economics at MIT in 1989. See his personal website at McGill for downloads of his published research as well as copies of his magazine editorials and articles: http://people.mcgill.ca/christopher.ragan/.

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Dr. Richard G. Lipsey is the original author of Economics. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University. He is an officer of the Order of Canada, a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Econometric Society, and a past president of both the Canadian Economic Society and the Atlantic Economic Society. He also holds honorary doctorates from the University of McMaster, the University of Victoria, Carleton University, Queen's University, the University of Toronto, Guelph University, the University of Western Ontario, the University of British Columbia, Essex University (England), and Simon Fraser University. In 2006, he was awarded the SSHRC gold medal for outstanding lifetime professional achievement.

Dr. Lipsey received his BA from UBC in 1951, his MA from Toronto in 1953, and his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1957. He has held a chair in Economics at the London School of Economics and was Chairman of the Department of Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the newly founded University of Essex, in England. He has also held visiting appointments in England at the University of Manchester and City University; in the U.S. at the Universities of California (Berkeley), Colorado, and Yale (where he was Irving Fisher visiting professor in 1979–1980); and in Canada at the Universities of British Columbia and Victoria. From 1970 to 1986, he was Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Economics at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. From 1983 to 1988, he was senior economic advisor for the C.D. Howe Institute, where he edited the Institute's Inflation and Trade Monitors. During that time, he co-authored monographs on Canada's trade options (with Murray Smith) and on the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement (with Robert York) as well as wrote over a dozen articles and pamphlets on various aspects of the free-trade debate. He was a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Founding Director of their large-scale, international research project on economic growth and policy from 1989–1994 and then a member until 2002.

Dr. Lipsey has published nearly 200 articles in learned journals and books on various aspects of theoretical and applied economics. He is also a frequent commentator on economic policy issues in Canada and in 1982 received, along with Doug Purvis, the National Business Writing Award "for distinguished financial writing by Canadians who are not primarily journalists."

He has served as an independent policy advisor to many national organizations in both the U.K. and Canada. In 1976, he wrote the economic brief that the Canadian Labour Congress presented to the Supreme Court of Canada as part of their appeal against setting up the Anti-Inflation Board. This was the first time in history that a supreme court operating in the parliamentary system accepted and responded to expert evidence.

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