Dr. Chris Ragan

Chris Ragan is the inaugural Director of McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and is an Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of Economics. He is the Chair of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, which launched in November 2014 with a 5-year horizon to identify policy options to improve environmental and economic performance in Canada. He is also a member of the federal finance minister’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which began in early 2016. Chris is a Research Fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute, and from 2010-13 he held the Institute’s David Dodge Chair in Monetary Policy (and for many years was a member of its Monetary Policy Council). In 2009-10, Chris was the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada; and in 2004-05 he served as Special Advisor to the Governor of the Bank of Canada.
Chris’s published research focuses mostly on the conduct of macroeconomic policy. His 2004 book, co-edited with William Watson, is called Is the Debt War Over? In 2007 he published A Canadian Priorities Agenda, co-edited with Jeremy Leonard and France St-Hilaire from the Institute for Research on Public Policy. The Ecofiscal Commission’s The Way Forward (2015) was awarded the Doug Purvis Memorial Prize for that year’s best work in Canadian economic policy. Finally, Chris is an enthusiastic teacher and public communicator. In 2007 Ragan was awarded the Noel Fieldhouse teaching prize at McGill. He is the author of Economics (formerly co-authored with Richard Lipsey), which after fifteen editions is still the most widely used introductory economics textbook in Canada. Ragan also writes frequent columns for newspapers, most often in The Globe and Mail (see his McGill website for downloads https://mcgill.ca/economics/christopher-t-s-ragan). He teaches in several MBA and Executive MBA programs, including at McGill, EDHEC in France, and in special courses offered by McKinsey & Company. He gives dozens of public speeches every year.