ABOUT THE TEAM

Lauren Johnston

Economist

[email protected]

+1.808.523.1650

Lauren is our Country Economist for the Federated States of Micronesia under our capacity building project for the Northern Pacific, funded by the Asian Development Bank. She is also our Country Team Leader for the project.

An Australian national, she brings to our Team two decades of experience in economic and international development policy and in the education sector. 

Lauren began her career as an intern at KPMG in China working on joint-venture investment contracts and learning Chinese (Mandarin). After a Masters in at the University of London (SOAS), she served an ODI Fellow and Senior Economist in the Debt Management Division of the Ministry of Finance of Guyana, and in the Ministry of Development and Economic Planning of Sierra Leone. Her roles included supporting local staff with debt sustainability forecasts and external capital budget numbers for both the national budget and IMF program requirements. This data was also fundamental to promoting elevated donor coordination and budget planning and funding strategizing. 

From Sierra Leone Lauren joined the World Economic Forum, Geneva, as a Global Leadership Fellow. She was responsible for leading the Forum’s relations with International Organisations (the UN family) and the G20/global monetary reform initiative. Lauren’s observations in Guyana, Sierra Leone and “Davos” led her to pursue a PhD in Economics at Peking University (in Chinese). After intensive coursework, Lauren’s wrote a 100,000-character thesis studying China-Africa trade and development, the genesis of which she presented to President Xi Jinping’s Africa advisor in February 2013 in Beijing, on behalf of the Ambassadors to China of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. 

An academic and research career in economics and China studies ensued, at the University of Melbourne, her undergraduate alma mater, and Mercator Institute for China Studies, Berlin. Lauren is widely published in the areas of China economy with respect to ties with Africa, the Belt and Road Initiative, and demographic change. She has supervised graduate students, taught students in Beijing, and accompanied a University of Melbourne cohort on a study tour to Taiwan. 

She is delighted to be working in the Pacific and applied economic and development policy again, and to be living by the sea again too. She is concurrently an Adjunct Associate Professor, China Studies Centre, University of Sydney, and an affiliate senior researcher, South African Institute of International Affairs.