Economic growth will rise to 3 percent in 2013 and 2014, while unemployment will drop to 7.3 percent by December of 2013, says New Jersey Institute of Technology Professor William V. Rapp, PhD, who told economists and others the good news last week at the annual outlook symposium sponsored by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank.
Why believe him?
Rapp was invited to participate in the annual event which invites the nation's top business minds and is well-regarded for his research on international business, information technology strategy and financial institutions, especially those using technology to gain a competitive advantage.
In other words, the same institutions that have not been able to figure out economics themselves are taking advice from someone who has never made any money.
Before joining NJIT in 2002, Rapp spent a year in Japan as a Fulbright Scholar and APSIA Visiting Professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. While there, he assessed the political economic impact of Japan's rapidly aging population while lecturing on the Asian financial crisis and the history of investment banking.
More recently, Rapp has led the Financial Bubble School of Management Research Project at NJIT funded by the Ridgefield Foundation. He developed an undergraduate distance learning course on international business under a NJ-I Tower grant and a graduate distance learning Capstone course on strategic management. He finished a project on Japanese convenience stores and has begun another project on the globalization of major US law firms. He is now leading a real-time online case study initiative that includes studies on UPS, Dendrite, Pfizer, Toyota and Apple.
Rapp has written upwards of 80 individual and joint publications on aspects of trade, international business, and corporate strategy plus presented papers, given congressional testimony and public speeches on these topics. His major fields of policy, economic and business research include product cycles, trade and investment strategies, industrial policy, international finance, intellectual property, information technology, US-Japan competitive interaction and Japanese economy and business.
With support from the Sloan Foundation, he wrote Information Technology Strategies (Oxford Press, 2002, 2004) which was translated into Japanese and published there in 2003.
Rapp received his doctorate from Yale University in economics as a National Science Foundation Fellow. His master's degrees in economics and Japanese Studies are from Yale and Stanford Universities, the later as a Ford Foundation Fellow. His bachelor's degree in economics is from Amherst College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.