Zhi Wang

Zhi Wang is a research professor of Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is also a professor and founding director of Research Center of Global Value Chains at University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.

He worked as a lead international economist in the research division of the U.S. International Trade Commission for more than 10 years before his current appointment. He also worked as a consultant for the World Bank in the World Development Report, 1995, as an economist at Purdue University, Economic Research service (ERS) of U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of U.S. Department of Commerce, and as a senior research scientist at School of Computational Sciences of George Mason University before he joined USITC in 2005.

He was a research fellow at Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences before he came to the United States and served on the board of directors of the Chinese Economists Society (CES) during 1992-93. His major fields of expertise include computable general equilibrium modeling, value chain in global production network, measuring trade in value-added, data reconciliation methods, economic integration among Greater China area, Chinese economies, and international trade.

Because of his contribution to the GTAP database and to its use in contemporary policy applications, and his methodological contributions in reconciling re-export trade data, he was selected as Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) research fellow multiple times in 2000-03, 2007-10, and 2011-14. He also served as the U.S. co-chair of the APEC Trade in Value-added (TiVA) technical group in 2015, leading the efforts to build APEC TiVA database. He also selected by Fulbright senior scholar program offering general equilibrium trade policy analysis classes at Chengchi University in Taipei and Tsinghua University in Beijing during 2005 and 2007 respectively. 

Wang has long list of publication in world leading economic journals, including the American Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Regional Sciences, Journal of Comparative Economics, and Journal of Policy Modeling. He is the coeditor of the 2017 and 2019 Global Value Chain development report published by the World Bank and WTO, and the author and coauthor of several books and many book chapters, including Global Economic Effects of the Asian Currency Devaluations (PIIE, 1998), The Implications of China-Taiwan Economic Liberalization (PIIE, 2010), and Trade in Value Added: Developing New Measures of Cross-Border Trade (CEPR and the World Bank, 2013).

He obtained his PhD in applied economics with a minor in computer and information sciences at the University of Minnesota in 1994.

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Areas of Research

• Gross Trade Accounting
• Measuring Trade in Value-Added
• Value Chain in Global Production Network
• Computable General Equilibrium Modeling
• Data Reconciliation Methods
• Economic Integration Among Greater China Area
• Chinese Economies
• International Trade