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Professor Russel Cooper is an Honorary Professor at the School of Business, UNSW Canberra.

Professional and Teaching Experience

After graduating from Macquarie University, Russel Cooper worked at the Reserve Bank of Australia (1973-74) before undertaking a PhD and taking up academic positions at Monash University (1975-80); Macquarie University (1981-90); University of Western Sydney (UWS) (1991-2005; appointed foundation professor at the Nepean network partner in 1995). In 2006-09 Russel worked as a private consultant and as a part time professorial research fellow at Macquarie University.

His early academic career at Macquarie was primarily devoted to teaching (mainly applied econometrics). His mid career at UWS was initially heavily oriented towards academic administration. In the early 2000s, Russel moved to UWS’s Australian Expert Group in Industry Studies with the aid of a research collaboration grant from the Communications Economics and Electronic Markets Research Centre, Curtin University of Technology. Two ARC funded Discovery Projects followed (one on the regional economics of the ‘digital divide’ and another on forecasting with short time series – a special problem with innovative technologies).

Russel’s research interests include new growth economics, inter-industry modelling, applied consumer demand studies, spatial economics, and the application of new technologies as an aid to development. He is currently developing new research projects on effects of worldwide shocks (benign and adverse) on national economies, and differential impacts across socio economic groups.

Developing tools for quantifying the productivity of innovations in IT has been the focus of Russel’s recent consultancy work. He is now scoping the prospects for developing an interactive framework that will enable visitors to his ADFA website to conduct ‘What If?’ experiments in any of over 30 countries worldwide, enabling cross-regional comparisons and evaluating the effect on economies of further public/private sector joint investment in innovative IT projects.