Peter Neary was Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of Merton College Oxford. He held full-time positions at Trinity College Dublin and at University College Dublin where he was Professor of Political Economy from 1980 to 2006. In 2017-18 he was President of the Royal Economic Society.
Educated at University College Dublin and Oxford, he completed his D.Phil. in 1978. He was a post-doctoral Visiting Scholar at MIT and a Visiting Professor at Princeton, Berkeley, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, and the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He was an editor of the European Economic Review from 1986 to 1990 and served on a number of other editorial boards. He was President of the European Economic Association in 2002, and played a leading role in establishing the Journal of the European Economic Association. He lectured widely, including the 2002 Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, the 2008-2009 Graham Lecture at Princeton, and the 2015 Corden Lecture at the University of Melbourne.
Measuring the Restrictiveness of International Trade Policy by Jim Anderson and Peter Neary was published by MIT Press in 2005. Peter Neary also edited three other books and published over a hundred professional papers. His main research field was international trade theory, where he worked on short- to long-run adjustment, the economics of resource-rich economies (especially the "Dutch Disease"), trade and industrial policy, and the implications of imperfect competition (especially oligopoly) for trade and globalisation, among other topics. He also wrote on consumer theory (including rationing and index numbers), industrial organisation (including the economics of research and development), and macroeconomics (including international macro theory and Irish economic policy).
In addition to his full-time position in Oxford, he was a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.