Born in Melbourne to Herbert Bishop Dixon and Margaret Vera Laybourne-Smith, Dixon attended
Melbourne Grammar School and
Monash University (
BEc, 1967),
Harvard (
AM,
PhD 1972) where he worked as teaching assistant from 1970 to 1972. Dixon then worked from 1972 until 1974 for the
International Monetary Fund in Washington and for the
Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney in 1974/75. In 1974 he returned to Monash University. As a senior lecturer in the economics department and consultant to the Australian government's IMPACT project under Alan Powell until 1978, he started work on general equilibrium theory. Powell and Dixon were the joint recipients of the 1983 Research Medal of the
Royal Society of Victoria. Dixon then worked as professor of economics at
La Trobe University until 1984, with a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1983. From 1984 until 1991, Dixon was professor of economics at the
University of Melbourne and director of the
Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. From 1991 until 2014 he served as director, later principal researcher, of the Centre of Policy Studies (CoPS) at Monash University. CoPS and Dixon then moved to
Victoria University. Dixon is mainly known for developing, with his collaborators, computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. A further development of
Leif Johansen's multi-sectoral model, Dixon's ORANI model (1977, 1982), named after his wife, built on work by
Paul Armington and
Wassily Leontief its dynamic further development, the MONASH/VU-National model, and the US
Applied General Equilibrium (USAGE) model which is widely used by the US government and the
Global Trade Analysis Project. These models are available in CoPS's
Gempack/
RunGEM software implementation. Dixon and his wife, Orani, have been married since 1968, and they have two daughters, including the academic Prof. Dr. Janine Margaret Dixon. Dixon is member of the
Melbourne Cricket Club. ==Awards==