Song Yifan

Personal Statement

Bayannao’er, a developing city of Inner Mongolia, located in Northern China, is where I was born. There are about 20 minorities living on its vast land, thus exposing me to the multitudinous cultures and traditions, teaching me to respect different cultures, making me an open minded person. Aside from its diverse ethnicity, the abundant natural resources make it possible to reach economic prosperity for my hometown. However, it is no denial that the comprehensive economic situation is yet to be improved. So a dream was inbred deeply in my heart - to contribute myself to bring practical economic growth and improve the living standard there.

Driven by this dream, I chose financial engineering as my undergraduate major in the hope of laying foundation for my future career. Courses like microeconomics, macroeconomics, international economics, etc. availed me to have a general idea of the basic principles of economics. In the meanwhile, I studied the welfare economics, institutional economics, and regional economics all by myself in my free time. Through my studies I found that Developmental Economics to be my academic interest. Therefore, I spent a lot of time studying them and now I am familiar with some basic theories and practices regarding this field, for instance, the Two Gap Model, the Developmental Poles Theory, the Estimated Price Analysis of the investment Project etc. Particularly, Agriculture and Industrialization wrote by Peiwen Zhang, Father of Developmental Economics, gave me lots of aspirations in this field. In addition, I keep keen concern and study on Regional Economics. After I read Von Thumen’s masterpiece The Isolated State, Alfred Weber’s Industrial Location Theory, Nekrasov’s Regional Economics, I compared their different objects of study and viewpoints. On one hand, I am more inclined to accept Hoover, Qiye Zhou and Zaixing Liu’s opinions that the regional economics made researches on the main economics problems. On the...