From 1993 until March 31st 2006 Bill Emmott was the editor of The Economist, the world's leading weekly magazine on current affairs and business. He has now stood down from that post to become an independent writer, speaker and consultant, based in London and Somerset. When he left, The Economist's circulation was almost 1.1m, worldwide, having more than doubled in the previous 13 years.
After studying politics, philosophy and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, he moved to Nuffield College to do postgraduate research into the French Communist party's spell in government in 1944-47.
Before completing that, however, in 1980 he joined The Economist's Brussels office, writing about EEC affairs and the Benelux countries. In 1982 he became the paper's economics correspondent in London and the following year moved to Tokyo to cover Japan and South Korea. In mid-1986 he returned to London as the finance and economics editor; in January 1989 he became business affairs editor, responsible for all the paper's coverage of business, finance and science. He was appointed to the editorship of The Economist in March 1993.
He co-wrote with Rupert Pennant-Rea "The Pocket Economist", part of The Economist series of pocket guides, which was published by Blackwell's in 1983.
He has written six books on Japan: "The Sun Also Sets: the limits to Japan's economic power", published by Times Books in America, Simon & Schuster in the UK and Soshisha in Japan in 1989; "Japan's Global Reach: the influence, strategies and weaknesses of Japan's multinational corporations", published by Century Business in 1992 and (under the title "Japanophobia") by Times Books in America in 1993; "Kanryo no Taizai" (The bureaucrats' deadly sins), published only in Japanese by Soshisha in 1996; and, most recently, a book version of an extended essay, published in The Economist in October 2005 and called "The Sun also Rises" to echo his 1989 book. This longer, book version was published in Japanese translation under that same title (Hiwa Mata Noboru in Japanese) by Soshisha in January 2006. A fifth book about Japan, a compilation of columns from Japanese magazines, was published by PHP in October 2006 under the title of "Japan's new golden age--of the next ten years". In February 2007 a sixth was published, again in Japanese only: "Japan's Choices", or "Nihon no sentaku", a discussion with Peter Tasker, published by Kodansha.
"The Sun Also Sets" was a bestseller in Japanese, with more than 300,000 copies sold. "The Sun Also Rises" has also proved popular in Japanese, with more than 120,000 copies in print.
In September 1999 he wrote an extended essay for The Economist on the 20th century, called "Freedom's journey". In June 2002 he wrote another extended essay for The Economist, on America's world role following September 11th, called "Present at the Creation".
His book "20:21 Vision – 20th century lessons for the 21st century", which builds in part on the foundation of those essays, was published in February 2003 by The Penguin Press in Britain, Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, S. Fischer Verlag in Germany and Soshisha in Japan.
In June 2003 he wrote another extended essay for The Economist on capitalism and democracy, to mark the publication's 160th anniversary.
Bill's latest book will be published in April 2008 in Britain and May in the United States. The title will be "Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade". The publishers will be Allen Lane/The Penguin Press in Britain, Harcourt in America, Nikkei in Japan, Rizzoli in Italy, Ars Longa in Taiwan and Random House in South Korea.
Bill writes regular columns on international affairs for Italy's top daily newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, for Exame, Brazil's leading business magazine, for a Japanese monthly magazine, Ushio, and for the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's biggest-selling daily newspapers. In Ushio the column appears in both Japanese, translated by Masahiro Ugaya, and English. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian's "comment is free" blog and to PostGlobal, a forum run by the Washington Post. His columns are now also appearing in BusinessWorld, India's leading business magazine.
In 2003, Bill Emmott was chosen by a jury of senior Italian journalists as the winner of the "È giornalismo" ("This is journalism") award, the first time that a foreigner had been given this prestigious Italian journalism prize. In 2006-07, Bill received four journalism awards in Britain: a special award from the Wincott Foundation; the "business journalist of the year" award from the London Press Club; the "decade of excellence" award from the World Leadership Forum's business journalism awards programme; and a "lifetime achievement" award from the Work Foundation.
Bill Emmott is a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission, a director of Development Consultants International, a Dublin-based company, a member of the Swiss Re Chairman's Advisory Panel, an adviser to JR Central, a member of the President's Council of the University of Tokyo, a director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, and co-chairman (with the Hon Roy MacLaren) of the Canada-Europe Roundtable for Business. He was a director of The Economist Group from 1993 until 2006. He is a trustee of the Marjorie Deane Financial Journalism Foundation. He has honorary degrees from Warwick and City Universities, and is an honorary fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
