O'Hara, Phillip Anthony 1954-

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O'Hara, Phillip Anthony 1954-

PERSONAL:

Born 1954. Education: Western Australian Institute of Technology, B.A. (economics and geography), 1976; University of Western Australia, Diploma of Education, 1977; Murdoch University, B.A. (economics), 1979; University of Newcastle, Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Global Political Economy Research Unit, Curtin University of Technology, G.P.O. Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845, Australia. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Department of Industrial Development, Western Australian State Government, research assistant, 1979-80; University of Technology, Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, tutor in economics, 1980-82; University of New South Wales, Sydney, teaching fellow in economics, 1983; University of Newcastle, Newcastle, New South Wales, lecturer and tutor in economics, 1984-86; Charles Stuart University, Bathurst, New South Wales, lecturer in economics, 1987-88; Curtin Business School, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia, lecturer, 1988-94, senior lecturer, 1995-98, associate professor of economics, 1999-2004, director of Global Political Economy Research Unit, 2000—professor of global political economy and governance, 2004—. Visiting professor at Marquette University, 1995, and Institute for Social and Institutional Economics, 2005; visiting scholar at Catholic University of America, 1991, California State University, Fresno, 1995, Harvard University, 1995, University of California, Riverside, 1998-99, and Loyola Marymount University, 2002. Director of Association for Evolutionary Economics, 1998-2001; trustee of Association for Social Economics, 1999-2002.

MEMBER:

International Association for Feminist Economics, International Society for Ecological Economics, European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, Union for Radical Political Economics, History of Economic Thought Society of Australia, Association for Social Economics.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Article of the Year Award, Curtin Business School, 1995, for "Household Labor, the Family and Macroeconomic Stability of the United States 1940s-1990s"; Clarence Ayres Award for excellence in institutional economics, Association for Evolutionary Economics, 1998; Researcher of the Year Award, Curtin Business School, 1999; Gunnar Myrdal Prize, European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, 2002, for Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy: Principles and Unstable Dynamics of Capitalism.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Encyclopedia of Political Economy, two volumes, Routledge (New York, NY), 1999, reprinted, 2001.

Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy: Principles and Unstable Dynamics of Capitalism, Edward Elgar (Northampton, MA), 2000.

(Editor) Global Political Economy and the Wealth of Nations: Performance, Institutions, Problems, and Policies, Routledge (New York, NY), 2004.

Growth and Development in the Global Political Economy: Social Structures of Accumulation and Modes of Regulation, Routledge (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Capital and Inequality in Today's World, 1998; The Economics of Public Spending: Debts, Deficits and Economic Performance, 2000; and Veblen's Analysis of Business, Industry and the Limits of Capital: An Interpretation and Sympathetic Critique, 2003. Contributor to professional journals, including Journal of Economic Issues, Review of Social Economy, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, International Journal of Social Economics, Journal of Economic and Social Policy, and History of Economic Ideas. Member of editorial board of International Journal of Human Development, 2000—, Intervention Journal of Economics, 2003—, and European Journal of Management and Public Policy, 2004—; associate editor, Review of Social Economy, 2002—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Phillip Anthony O'Hara is a professor of global political economy and governance at the Curtin University of Technology and the director of the university's Global Political Economy Research Unit. An associate editor of the Review of Social Economy, O'Hara specializes in political economy, the history of economic thought, and international economics.

O'Hara served as the editor for Encyclopedia of Political Economy, a two-volume set published in 1999. Among the many subjects covered in the work are the history of political economy, business cycle theories, radical institutionalism, and credit, money, and finance.

A Booklist reviewer stated that the encyclopedia "emphasizes the application of economic principles to real-world problems such as inflation, unemployment, poverty, and financial instability." "The most direct, and perhaps enjoyable, method of using this encyclopedia is to leaf through its two volumes to find that one entry, among the 450, that addresses the issue one is interested in," noted Mayo Toruno in the Journal of Economic Issues. "But, this kind of browsing inevitably leads to the reading of other, sometimes unrelated, entries, which, of course, is part of the pleasure, particularly when the entries are as well written as they are in this encyclopedia." A second method takes advantage of the design of the encyclopedia, which is organized around twenty major topics. "This structure, called the A-Z list and laid out at the beginning of the encyclopedia, has the advantage of providing the reader with a set of related entries," Toruno wrote. A contributor to the Journal of Australian Political Economy deemed Encyclopedia of Political Economy "an impressive stocktaking of the main concerns of political economy," and Norman B. Hutcherson, writing in Library Journal, described it as "an authoritative work on the current state of the field." "This is an excellent reference source, well suited for the non-specialist seeking to understand political economy," Toruno wrote.

In Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy: Principles and Unstable Dynamics of Capitalism, O'Hara examines the evolution of the capitalist system, focusing on the policies of philosopher and political economist Karl Marx and sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, a founder of the institutional economics movement. According to Martin H. Wolfson, writing in the Economic Record, the work "makes a strong case that neo-Marxism and neoinstitutionalism share much common theoretical and methodological ground." Wolfson added that the book "should be read by all economists, but it will be particularly useful to heterodox economists interested in exploring the commonalities between Marxism and institutionalism, and using that analysis to understand and change contemporary capitalism." Hans G. Despain, reviewing the work in Constitutional Political Economy, similarly noted that Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy "makes great strides toward building an institutionally-grounded radical political economy capable of reducing future conflicts and crises." Wolfson concluded: "Readers wishing to understand contemporary capitalism, and to perceive the possibilities of a new Institutional Political Economy, will be well rewarded by reading O'Hara's important contribution."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Australian Economic History Review, March, 2002, Gary Shiu, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy: Principles and Unstable Dynamics of Capitalism, pp. 108-109.

Booklist, October 15, 1999, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, p. 474.

Constitutional Political Economy, March, 2003, Hans G. Despain, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy, pp. 75-77.

Eastern Economic Journal, fall, 2003, Michel De Vroey, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, pp. 629-630.

Economic Journal, November, 2000, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, pp. 765-766.

Economic Record, March, 2004, Martin H. Wolfson, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy, pp. 130-131.

European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Volume 7, number 3, Thomas Huth, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy.

History of Economics Review, winter, 2002, Jan Toporowski, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy, pp. 171-176; winter, 2003, Peter Groenewegan, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, pp. 159-162.

International Journal of Social Economics, December, 2002, Wolfram Elsner, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy, pp. 123-124.

Journal of Australian Political Economy, number 43, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, pp. 148-149.

Journal of Economic Issues, December, 2001, Daniel Fusfeld, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy, pp. 1033-1035; December, 2003, Mayo Toruno, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, pp. 1186-1188.

Library Journal, February 1, 1999, Norman B. Hutcherson, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, p. 76.

New Political Economy, Volume 7, number 2, Randall D. Germain, review of Encyclopedia of Political Economy, pp. 299-307.

Review of Social Economy, December, 2002, John Henry and Howard J. Sherman, review of Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy.