Dr M Hashem Pesaran is a Professor of Economics at Cambridge University and a Professorial Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Previously, he was head of the Economic Research Department of the Central Bank of Iran and the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Iran. He has also been a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Applied Econometrics Program at UCLA, and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California, where he has served as the Director of USC College Institute for Economic Policy Research over the period October 2004 to April 2006.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics. He is the recipient of the 1990 George Sell Prize from The Institute of Petroleum, London, the 1992 Royal Economic Society Prize for the best article published in The Economic Journal for the years 1990 and 1991, and the joint recipient of the Econometric Reviews Best Paper Award 2002-2004 for his paper on Long Run Structural Modeling.
Dr Pesaran is the founding editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics, and a co-developer of Microfit, an econometric software package published by Oxford University Press. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Economic Research Forum for Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey over the period, and has served as a member of the World Bank's Council of Advisers for the Middle East and North Africa, 1996-2000.
Dr Pesaran has served as a non-executive Director on the Board of Acorn Investment Trust, Chiltern PLC, and Cambridge Econometrics, and is now Honorary President of Cambridge Econometrics. In 1997 he became a Charter Member of the Oliver Wyman Institute, serving until January 2000. Between 2000 and 2002 he was appointed Vice President in charge of development and computerized trading systems at Tudor Investment Corporation, Connecticut, USA.
He has over 160 publications in leading scientific journals and edited volumes in the areas of econometrics, empirical finance and macroeconomics and the Iranian economy, and is an expert in the economics of oil and the Middle East. He is the author of The Limits to Rational Expectations (Blackwell), and co-author of several books, Dynamic Regression: Theory and Algorithms (with Lucy Slater), Keynes' Economics: Methodological Issues, (ed. with Tony Lawson), Disaggregation in Economic Modelling (ed. with Terry Barker), Non-linear Dynamics, Chaos and Econometrics (JW, ed. with Simon Potter), Blackwell's Handbook of Applied Econometrics: Volume I, Macroeconomics (ed. with Mike Wickens), and Volume II, Microeconomics (ed. with Peter Schmidt), Energy Demand in Asian Developing Economies (with Ron Smith and Taka Akiyama, OUP), Analysis of Panels and Limited Dependent Variables: A Volume in Honour of G S Maddala (ed. with Cheng Hsiao, Kajal Lahiri and Lung-Fei Lee, CUP), Global and National Macroenonometric Modelling: A Long Run Structural Approach (with Garratt, Lee, and Shin, OUP, 2006), Explaining Growth in the Middle East, (ed. with Jeff Nugent, North-Holland, 2007).

Iranian Economy in Twentieth Century: A Global Perspective
This paper examines the economic transformation of Iran in global context through the Twentieth Century. At the start of that century, the Iranian economy had long remained stagnant, poor, and largely agrarian, with a marginal role in the world economy. By the turn of 21st century, Iran had transformed into a complex and relatively large economy with a non-negligible impact on many parts of the world. While the initial conditions and the evolution of domestic institutions and resources played major roles in the pace and nature of that transformation, relations with the rest of the world had crucial influences as well. This paper focuses on the latter forces, while taking account of their interactions with domestic factors in shaping the particular form of economic development in Iran. We study the ways in which the development of the Iranian economy has been affected by international price movements and by the ebbs and flows of trade, investment, and economic growth in the rest of the world. In considering these effects, we also analyze the role of domestic political economy factors and policies in enhancing or hindering the ability of domestic producers to respond to external challenges and opportunities.