At 14:30 on May 2, 2018, the 69^th BNUBS Master Forum was successfully held in Room 1620 of the main building. The forum was honored to invite Peter Dixon, a professor from the Policy Research Center of the University of Victoria, to give a lecture titled “CGE Labor-market Modelling: the Case of US Illegal Immigration. The forum was hosted by Professor Luo Chuliang of BNUBS.

After working for the International Monetary Fund and the Reserve Bank of Australia, Professor Peter Dixon joined the Australian Government’s IMPACT project in 1975. The ORANI model, which he led and created in IMPACT, is the world’s first computable general equilibrium model that is often used for policy analysis. Also in the 1990s, with colleagues at Monash University, he created MONASH models. These two models have been in the Australian economic debate for 35 years and are used as templates for other models worldwide.

In recent years, Professor Peter Dixon has developed the US USAGE model, which is applied to the US International Trade Commission, Agriculture, Business, Energy, Transportation and Homeland Security. At the same time, Professor Peter Dixon also published several books on CGE models, as well as many papers in leading international magazines.

At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Peter Dixon raised a question “Should the illegal immigration be restricted or relaxed?” to start the subject and then used a large amount of data to show that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States had risen sharply in recent years and was expected to rise to 12.4 million by 2019. Models were used to simulate the trends of illegal immigrants’ employment, consumption, investment, etc. in the United States during 2005-2019 under supply constraints, and specific theoretical assumptions of the model and the demand curve of illegal immigrants in 2019 were given. Finally, based on the simulation model, Professor Peter Dixon concluded that strengthening border security would reduce the welfare of American families, but raising the productivity of the immigrant population would increase it.

After the speech, the teachers and students discussed actively with Professor Peter Dixon on the paper’s analysis framework and conclusion and the forum ended in a warm applause.