Principal speaker
Mr Mark Thirlwell
Appointed as Austrade's Chief Economist in September 2013, Mark has been tracking global economic trends since he joined the Bank of England's International Divisions in 1990, where he worked as part of the Whitehall Economists Subgroup, coordinating the forecasting of major emerging markets across the Bank, Treasury, the FCO and other stakeholders. Mark later joined J P Morgan in London as a Vice President in Economic Research with responsibility for Central and Eastern Europe. After moving to Australia, he served as Senior Economist at Australia's Export Finance and Insurance Corporation (Efic), working on sovereign risk with a particular focus on East Asia.
Before joining Austrade, Mark was the inaugural Director of the Lowy Institute's International Economy Program and also a Fellow at the Institute's G20 Studies Centre. He was one of the original research team that helped establish the Lowy Institute as one of Australia's leading think tanks.
Mark is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University's National Security College. He has degrees in economics from Cambridge and Oxford Universities and a postgraduate qualification in applied finance from Macquarie University.