Ross McLeod

Dr. McLeod began his professional career as a civil engineer, but soon switched to become an economist, and is now a Senior Fellow in the Indonesia Project, Division of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, at the Australian National University. He has been working in and on Indonesia in various capacities – postgraduate student, consultant and academic researcher – since 1978, and is a fluent Indonesian speaker. Since October 1998 he has been Editor of the ANU’s Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, a journal that has provided continuous commentary on, and analysis of, Indonesia’s economy and economic policies, since 1965. His research for the last several years has concentrated heavily on the financial crisis that struck East Asia (and Indonesia, in particular) in 1997–98, and he is the joint editor (with Professor Ross Garnaut) of one of the first major studies of the crisis to be published: East Asia in Crisis: From being a miracle to needing one? (Routledge 1998). More generally, he has written on both monetary and banking policy. He also takes a keen interest in the process of taking Indonesia from autocracy to democracy, seen from an economics perspective.