INSEAD Professor of Marketing and the Chaired Professor of Management Science.
Philip M. Parker (Ph.D. Wharton) is an economist whose research looks into why existing theories governing macroecomic growth and firm level competition yield unreliable forecasts of actual market outcomes. He introduced the idea that physical sciences (physics and physiology) should be directly integrated into macroeconomics. His contrarian research concludes that certain economic development measures (such as income per capita) can dramatically exaggerate the levels of poverty in a country, but also be poor indicators of future economic growth. Some of his work was published in his book: Physioeconomics: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth, (The MIT Press, 2000). In it, he forecasts global economic and demographic trends to the year 2100. He argues that critical economic axioms violate laws of physics and shows that convergence across nations is unlikely, if not impossible, in the long run. Free markets will, however, allow countries to converge to similar levels of well-being across individuals, but at dramatically different levels of income-based consumption (i.e. low income countries may remain so, but will not be “poorer” than high income countries), provided that citizens are given economic liberty. Wealth redistribution, from “richer” countries to “poorer” countries, in these cases, is not justified for the sake of “poverty reduction”, and may actually increase poverty.
