On January 12, China Scholarship Council announced the funding list of the 2018 “International Cooperative Training Projects for Innovative Talent”. A total number of 29 newly-proposed projects from universities around China and 19 duly-executed ones were approved. The “Project for Innovative Talent of Econometrics and Statistics”, a collaborative project by the key laboratory of econometrics of the Ministry of Education (XMU) and the Institute of Applied Statistics and Economics (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is among the list.

The “International Cooperative Training Project for Innovative Talent” was established in 2014 by China Scholarship Council. 2018 has seen its continued implementation since it kicked off in August, 2017, and the project went through a process of verifying, reviewing, and interviewing before the final approval. This is aimed to better serve the national strategy, promote educational overhaul, build top-tier universities and educational programs, and foster more innovative, highly sought-after and interdisciplinary talent.

The approved project is another landmark achievement in the construction of the XMU Econometrics and Statistics, following the establishment of the key laboratory of econometrics back in 2009 and 111 project in 2012. This will improve the collaboration between XMU economics and the prestigious universities and research institutes from across the world. Besides, it will further enhance students’ creativity and global competence, thus to meet the demand of the nation for interdisciplinary, high-caliber and internationally-minded personnel.

XMU economics should take this opportunity to promote mutual communication and cooperation with HU Berlin with talent fostering at its core. In addition, the two schools need to combine their advantages and strengths to make leading international achievements in multiple areas including interdisciplinary research team construction, publications in the top journals of the world, major research projects and theoretical innovation, the conversion and application of research outcomes, quality graduate programs, education positions in top-tier universities for Ph.Ds. etc. so much so that XMU brains and schemes could play a constructive role on the global stage of econometrics and statistics.

The“Project for Innovative Talent of Econometrics and Statistics” is the continuation of the joint doctoral project （International Research Training Group，IRTG）between the Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE) and the Institute of Economics and management in HU Berlin. Centered on “high-dimensional and non-stationary time series”, the project smoothly passed the joint evaluation of the Ministry of Education and the German Science Foundation in 2013. After a year of training, the doctoral students will be sent to each other’s campus for a six-month exchange of visits and conduct joint research with their counterparts as well as professors over there. Up to now, WISE has sent 11 doctoral students of different majors to HU Berlin, where they have widened their global perspective, improved their research level, strengthened interdisciplinary thinking, honed their communicative skills and yielded considerable results. The Ph.D graduates of IRGT Project  have succeeded in acquiring teaching and postdoctoral positions in such universities and institutes at home and abroad including the University of Switzerland Gallen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, etc.

The approval of the project will further consolidate the leading position of XMU Econometrics and Statistics in China. In 2005, XMU established WISE and brought it up to international standard. Since Day One, WISE has recruited more than 20 top-class personnel in the field of econometrics from domestic and foreign universities, forming a globally competent cohort of teaching staff, in which the young and middle-aged teachers have become the mainstay. On the strength of the traditional advantages of the XMU economics and by virtue of the great capacity of the globewise WISE and XMU statistics, XMU econometrics has reaped a bountiful harvest of fruits in the interdisciplinary cooperation with microeconomics and finance, translating a bunch of high-quality research results into science articles published in top-tier journals, including the top five economics periodicals: American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies and the top four statistics periodicals Annals of Statistics, Biometrica, Journal of American Statistical association, Journal of Royal Statistical Society Series B. These papers have greatly boosted the academic strength and global clout of XMU in the fields of econometrics and statistics.

Edited by Wu Qianyi

Source: http://news.xmu.edu.cn/fc/06/c1552a326662/page.htm