José R. Sánchez-Fung

José R. Sánchez-Fung holds BA (PUCMM, Santo Domingo), and MA and PhD (University of Kent, UK) degrees in economics, and has more than 30 years of experience in academia and national public service. 

 

He is the Dominican Republic's ambassador and permanent representative to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and to the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, Switzerland. He also represents the Dominican Republic in the International Trade Center (ITC). 

 

Ambassador Sánchez-Fung is currently serving as president of UNCTAD’s Trade & Development Board, chairperson of the WTO's Committee on Balance-of-Payments Restrictions, chairperson of the Working Party on the Accession of Equatorial Guinea to the WTO and coordinator of the 39-country SIDS Group at UNCTAD.

 

Preceding the appointment in Geneva, he was ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, and head of the diplomatic mission, of the Dominican Republic to Switzerland, based in Bern. He was also ambassador and permanent representative of the Dominican Republic to the Universal Postal Union (UPU). 

 

Before joining his country’s foreign service, Dr Sánchez-Fung taught economics for over two decades at the University of Nottingham (Ningbo, China), Kingston University London (with tenure), and the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK). While at Kingston, he taught in Istanbul as an 'Erasmus Scholar'. His teaching career includes leading modules on monetary economics, international economics and policy, and applied econometrics; and for five years a course on China and the World Trade Organization (WTO) at Nottingham-Ningbo. Previously, he also taught at INTEC and PUCMM in the Dominican Republic. 

 

Dr Sánchez-Fung's  teaching career merited fellowship of the United Kingdom’s Higher Education Academy. 

 

His academic research focuses on empirical and policy-relevant issues with particular emphasis on open-economy macroeconomics and monetary policy, and development economics and policy; central banks and their policies is a key theme in his long-term research agenda. He is co-author of the textbook Monetary Economics in Developing Countries (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2007), and writes a monthly column (in Spanish) for the Dominican Republic-based blog site Empírica. Since 2007 he contributes monthly to the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic’s survey of macroeconomic expectations. 

 

Professor Sánchez-Fung is currently serving as a member of the international editorial board of the peer-reviewed academic journal Macroeconomics and Finance in Emerging Market Economies (Taylor & Francis Group).

 

His national public service includes working as an economist in the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic in Santo Domingo -inter alia, in the role of director of economic research and voting member of the monetary policy-making Open Market Committee-, and as an honorific advisor to the country's Senate (the upper house of the national parliament). 

 

Dr Sánchez-Fung has also been affiliated with the Bank of Finland in Helsinki and with the People’s Bank of China-University of Nottingham joint research center in Ningbo, and held visiting researcher positions at Columbia University's ILAS-School of International and Public Affairs, Fudan University in Shanghai, Georgetown University's CLAS-Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and the University of Oxford's St Antony’s College.