is currently Chairman, Adam Fforde and Associates p/l and Principal Fellow, the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. He has spent about 2/3 of his career in development consultancy and the rest as an academic. He studied Engineering and Economics at Oxford and then worked as an economic consultant in London before taking Masters and Doctoral Degrees in Economics at Birkbeck College London and Cambridge respectively. His PhD (1982) was about agricultural cooperatives in north Vietnam and he was a student at Hanoi University in 1978-79. From 1983-87 he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and since then he has combined academic and consulting work related to Vietnam and to development issues more generally. He worked for the Swedish-Vietnamese cooperation in 1987-92, and was a Senior Fellow at the SEA Studies Program, NUS, in 2000-2001. In Melbourne he has taught at Monash and the University of Melbourne. His most recent book on Vietnam is Vietnamese State Industry and the Political Economy of Commercial Renaissance: Dragon's tooth or curate's egg? Oxford: Chandos 2007.