Australian economist
Peter Bishop Dixon AO FASSA (born 23 July 1946) is an Australian economist known for his work in general equilibrium theory and computable general equilibrium models. He has published several books and more than two hundred academic papers on economic modelling and economic policy analysis.
Career.
Born in Melbourne to Herbert Bishop Dixon and Margaret Vera Laybourne-Smith, Dixon attended Melbourne Grammar School and Monash University (BEc, 1967), Harvard (AM, PhD 1972) where he worked as teaching assistant from 1970 to 1972.
Dixon then worked from 1972 until 1974 for the International Monetary Fund in Washington and for the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney in 1974/75. In 1974 he returned to Monash University. As a senior lecturer in the economics department and consultant to the Australian government's IMPACT project under Alan Powell until 1978, he started work on general equilibrium theory. Powell and Dixon were the joint recipients of the 1983 Research Medal of the Royal Society of Victoria. Dixon then worked as professor of economics at La Trobe University until 1984, with a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1983. From 1984 until 1991, Dixon was professor of economics at the University of Melbourne and director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. From 1991 until 2014 he served as director, later principal researcher, of the Centre of Policy Studies (CoPS) at Monash University. CoPS and Dixon then moved to Victoria University.
Dixon is mainly known for developing, with his collaborators, computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. A further development of Leif Johansen's multi-sectoral model, Dixon's ORANI model (1977, 1982), named after his wife, built on work by Paul Armington and Wassily Leontief its dynamic further development, the MONASH/VU-National model, and the US Applied General Equilibrium (USAGE) model which is widely used by the US government and the Global Trade Analysis Project. These models are available in CoPS's Gempack/RunGEM software implementation.
Dixon and his wife, Orani, have been married since 1968, and they have two daughters, including the academic Prof. Dr. Janine Margaret Dixon. Dixon is member of the Melbourne Cricket Club.
Publications.
Dixon has published more than 200 working papers and contributed to several journals and books. His major books include: