Jamie Smith
From UK to Fiji with Passion for Economics Field
For Jamie Smith, economics is about how people interact and how the world works.
The 27-year-old works as a Chief Economist at the Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission (FCCC).
Mr Smith is originally from Gateshead in the United Kingdom, and he lived in Fiji for three years.
Economics as a subject
He believes that economics was a really great subject if someone was interested in knowing more about how the world works.
He said Economics is a really broad field, and can end up specialising in just about anything.
“For example, the questions of why some areas can become hugely rich while others don’t, and whether government policies to reduce poverty, improve education or increase employment will be effective are immensely interesting, and economics gives you really useful tools to explore these,” he said.
Mr Smith has worked for the FCCC since 2018, he has also been designated as Senior
Economist and Office Manager while in this company.
He said “One of the really interesting things about working for the FCCC is that we’re involved in a really wide range of work.
“If it affects consumers or market competition in Fiji, we’ve got a role to play. We’ve got a pretty dynamic team at the FCCC so we cover a whole range of different issues, from price regulation to merger cases to a really wide range of market investigations.”
“This makes work interesting, but it also means you have to be able to get to grips with new problems in all sorts of different markets really quickly.”
Broad field
He said FCCC worked on a really wide range of things, so he had the chance to work on lots of really interesting things.
“The biggest cases I’ve worked on have been merger assessments – the FCCC essentially assesses whether one business should be allowed to buy another business,” he said.
“We have to assess whether allowing businesses to merge or buy one another would reduce the amount of competition in the market, which could lead to higher prices and lower quality products for people in Fiji.”
“These are always really interesting things to work on, because you get to learn a lot about different businesses and how they operate.”
He added that while he had been at the FCCC, he also worked on market investigations, which had led his team to make recommendations to various government ministries, and the FCCC inquiry into the Lagilagi Housing Development.
“Before coming to Fiji, I worked for the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK, who are the British equivalent of the FCCC. I mainly worked on merger cases over there, but I also got the chance to work on a few market investigations,” Mr Smith said.
“I enjoyed my time there – the CMA employs a lot of very talented economists, and I learnt a lot from them.”
He advises those who want to pursue their career in Economics to read as much as you can, as long as you feel you know more afterwards than you did beforehand.
“You don’t need to sit down and read an economics textbook or the Financial Times or anything like that. Just read anything that interests you and ask questions about why people behave in certain ways and you’ll be thinking like an economist in no time,” he said.