CEPR founder Richard Portes awarded CBE for services to economics

Professor Richard Portes, founder and President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and Chair of Economics at London Business School, has been created CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in the Queen's New Year's Honours list, for services to economics. Portes founded the economics department at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 1972, then in 1983 established CEPR. The Centre is based on a new model of organization, a "thinknet": a distributed network of economists who are affiliated with but not employed by CEPR, collaborating through the Centre on a wide range of policy-relevant research projects and dissemination activities.

CEPR has created a virtual "centre of excellence" for European economics through an active community of dispersed individual researchers, working together across international boundaries to produce high-quality research for use by the policy community and the private sector. It has sought to overcome the fragmentation of effort and lack of interaction among individual researchers. Today, CEPR's network of Research Fellows and Affiliates has grown to nearly 600 economists, based primarily in European universities, research institutes, central bank research departments, and international organisations.

Professor Portes's services to economics include also his role as Secretary-General of the Royal Economic Society. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has been at LBS since 1995, doing research on international macroeconomics and finance and teaching courses on European Financial Markets and on Global Capital Markets and Currencies.

Contact Information:

For interview requests and further information about CEPR please contact CEPR Press Officer Robbie Lonie, Tel: (44 020) 7878 2919, Mobile: 07740 519 225 or email rlonie@cepr.org

Notes for Editors:

CEPR is an international network of 600 Research Fellows based mainly in Europe, who collaborate through the Centre in research and its dissemination. CEPR helps its Research Fellows to develop projects, obtain their funding, administer them and disseminate their results. The Centre's research ranges from open economy macroeconomics to trade policy, from the economic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe to regionalism in the world economy.