Justin Yifu Lin is dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics and Institute of South–South Cooperation and Development, and professor and honorary dean of the National School of Development at Peking University. He was the senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, 2008–12. He had previously served for fifteen years as founding director and professor of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University. He is a councillor of the State Council and a member of the Standing Committee, Chinese People’s Political Consultation Conference. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Beating the Odds: Jump-starting Developing Countries (Princeton University Press, 2017); Going beyond Aid: Development Cooperation for Structural Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2017); The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off (Princeton University Press, 2012); New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development and Policy (World Bank, 2012); Against the Consensus: Reflections on the Great Recession (Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Demystifying the Chinese Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics (OUP, 2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Structural Change (OUP, 2019). He is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World.

Jiajun Xu, DPhil, is an assistant professor and the executive deputy dean of the Institute for New Structural Economics at Peking University. Xu worked at the United Nations and World Bank and currently acts as the general secretary of the Global Research Consortium on Economic Structural Transformation. Her research focuses on development financing, industrial parks, and global economic governance. She has published in top academic journals in the field of international development such as the Journal of International Development and Institute of Development Studies Bulletin. She is the guest editor of China Economic Review and the lead author of the ‘Global Development Financing Report’ (2015). Her academic monograph Beyond US Hegemony in International Development was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She has led several policy-oriented development projects aimed at leveraging special economic zones to achieve structural transformation in developing countries such as Benin, Djibouti, and Nigeria. Xu holds a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford.

Junjie Xia, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University. His research lies mainly in fields related to macroeconomics. His current research work connects theoretical mechanisms with salient microeconomic data in the fields of financial market imperfections and liquidity reallocations; resource misallocation and its implications for international trade and income distribution; automation, labour share, and industrial upgrading; housing and wealth mobility; and SOEs and industrial policy in China. Dr Xia obtained his PhD in economics from the University of Southern California in 2017.