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U S T . H K
Prof Francis Lui took part in the Tsinghua
University Forum of China and the World
Economy, held in January 2016.
Transferring Research from
Campus to Community
An important aspect of HKUST’s approach is to bring research
findings into arenas beyond the academic community in line
with the view that faculty members and researchers have a
valuable place in policy and public spheres.
“The impact of academic papers is long term, and its effect
on policy-makers may take years to filter down, if at all. To
contribute to issues at hand, it is necessary to communicate
important ideas accurately in layman’s language to popularize
the concepts for faster impact,” said Prof Francis Lui.
During the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, Prof Francis
Lui and four other HKUST academics were among a panel
of 10 leading economists in Hong Kong invited by the Hong
Kong Monetary Authority to give advice. Prof Lui and several
economics and finance colleagues also brought their expertise
to the public domain through a series of articles in the daily
Hong Kong Economic Journal
, a leading and influential
Chinese-language media that covers current economic and
financial issues, including state enterprise reform and the role
of IT for Hong Kong financial markets.
Prof Lui is frequently quoted in media on China-related
economic issues and is also a regular blogger. As an
internationally recognized economist, Prof Lui was invited by
the Vatican Foundation “Centesimus Annus” to participate in
its annual conference in 2013 on “Solidarity and Employment,
Is Economic Growth Still Meaningful” and in 2014 on “A Geo-
economic View of the World on Growth, Inequalities, and Jobs”.
He was able to meet the Pope on both occasions.
Discussions linking the current anti-corruption crackdown
and slowing of the Chinese economy are familiar ground for
Prof Francis Ting Ming Lui, who has pioneered research into
the economic implications of such behavior since the 1980s. A
founding faculty of HKUST’s Economics Department Prof Lui
is a renowned economist and thought leader in Hong Kong
and Mainland China, with frequent contributions in influential
news media.
Insufficient Competition
Prof Lui’s continuing research into the economics of corrup-
tion has shown it to be an imperfect attempt to restore the
price mechanism. “An Equilibrium Queuing Model of Bribery”,
published in the leading
Journal of Political Economy
(1985),
and cited over 900 times, was the first to use a highly math-
ematical model to specify the conditions under which bribery
would be a “lubricant” for the economy. He also identified brib-
ery and corruption as a symptom of insufficient market compe-
tition rather than a cause. In 1999, “Bureaucratic Corruption
and Endogenous Economic Growth” (with co-author I Ehrlich),
again published in the
Journal of Political Economy
, combined
Prof Lui’s past work with new insights following the collapse of
the Soviet Union and Eastern European economies, where cor-
ruption was discovered to be rampant. In addition, it brought
together his work on endogenous growth models, a perspective
that views policies, investment capital and a country’s internal
processes as being the major contributors to economic growth
rather than external factors.
CLEAN
SWEEP
The economic consequences of corrupt behavior have
been a long-time research focus for Prof Francis Lui
