Andrew Charlton: Economist & director for AlphaBeta

Andrew Charlton is a director for AlphaBeta, an international strategy and economics firm based in Sydney and Singapore. The company helps private companies, government offices, and non-profit organizations make better decisions by analyzing the economic forces that govern their sectors. Charlton and his teammates advise many different businesses across all industries make informed decisions and strategize for long-term success. 

Charlton is from Australia and has worked with many different Sydney-based businesses over the years, helping their leaders understand the forces governing their operations and their market shares. Charlton has worked as an economist and studied the discipline extensively during his long academic career.

Andrew Charlton earned a Doctorate from the Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Most of his academic research was focused on international economics, and how trade agreements and international development by individual companies has affected the world economy. Macroeconomics has long fascinated Charlton, and he has written numerous papers, articles, and books about many facets of the growing global economy. 

His work has been published in several leading international economics journals including the American Economic Review, World Trade Review, and World Economy. He co-wrote the book Free Trade for All with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and published Ozonomics in 2007.

Andrew Charlton used his knowledge of economic forces around the world to advise then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on how to proceed when the world’s economy was reeling from the crisis of 2008. Later that year, Rudd sent Charlton to represent his country at the G20 summit. He was also the country’s representative to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change. 

Charlton operated in these roles until 2010, when he joined the private sector in Australia, working for the conglomerate Wesfarmers. He was corporate strategy expert for two years, and an operations manager for another two with the company. Charlton was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011.

An expert on China and its role in the global economy, Andrew Charlton wrote an essay in Australia’s Quarterly Essay called “Dragon’s Tail: The Lucky CountryAfter the China Boom,” in 2014. At the time, most economists in Australia thought that China’s economy would continue to grow at the double-digit rates it had been for some time, but Charlton rightly predicted the fall of commodity prices resulting from China’s slowdown. 

This wasn’t the first time that Charlton warned Australian businesses about the potential dangers of China’s fast rise. In 2011, he challenged the mainstream belief among the country’s top economists that Australia as a nation would continue to benefit from China’s prolonged double-digit economy growth, warning businesses to protect themselves from falling commodity prices. 

Charlton has used his prowess as an economist to raise awareness in the Australian business community about the dangers of relying on China to continue its prodigious growth, arguing that, in part because the Chinese corporations allocating capital for political reasons rather than commercial ones, the Chinese economy is weaker than most people thought. 

Visit http://www.smh.com.au/news/planning/profile-andrew-charlton/2007/07/16/1184559700282.html   for more information about him.