Douglas May,

Dr. May is Professor of Economics at Memorial University of Newfoundland with cross-appointments in the Faculty of Business Administration and the Division of Community Health in the Faculty of Medicine.  He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of York in England, as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University.  Dr. May is a former Head of Department and Past-President of the Atlantic Canada Economics Association. He has also served on the Executive of the Canadian Economics Association as well as being on the editorial boards of the Canadian Journal of Economics and Canadian Journal of Regional Science.  He is currently a member of the National Accounts Advisory Committee of Statistics Canada and a member of the Canadian Index of Well-Being (CIW) National Working Group chaired by Roy Romanow for the Atkinson Foundation. He teaches applied welfare economics, labour economics, and business economics at the graduate level.

Dr. May’s initial research interests in his academic career involved an evaluation of the effectiveness of government tax incentives targeted at business as part of industrial growth and competitiveness strategies. The research widened to include measuring productivity growth and international competitiveness in manufacturing industries but later included natural resource industries. Professor May has carried out and published a great deal of research in applied research related to labour markets in Newfoundland and Labrador.  Recently he has worked closely with the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Department of Human Resources Labour and Employment and their newly formed Labour Market Development Unit (LMDU) (www.LMIworks.nl.ca) on the development of a provincial occupational skills forecasting model.

Over the past decade Dr. May has worked closely with the Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency and units of Memorial University as the conceptual architect of the Community Accounts (www.communityaccounts.ca) and its associated accounts.  During the period from 1996-2004, he created the System of Community Accounts (SCA) and also developed a “social audit” accountability framework. This framework used an evidence-based approach to measure program and policy outcomes based on “well-being”.  As an initial step in the social audit process, Dr. May oversaw the selection of the well-being indicators used in the Government’s publication, “From The Ground Up”.