Professor Rao has recently retired after a distinguishing academic career spanning a period of 45 years. He currently holds the title of Emeritus Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland. During his career he held professorial positions at the University of New England and the University of Queensland and held visiting positions at several overseas institutions. Rao has high professional standing reflected by his election as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia; Fellow and Council Member of the international Society for Economic Measurement; member of the Conference of Research in Income and Wealth at NBER. He served as a member on the Council of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. He has been a member of the Technical Advisory Group of the International Comparison Program at the World Bank since 2003. He is currently an Editor of the Review of Income and Wealth. Rao is an econometrician with focus on economic measurement. He has made significant contributions in several areas including index number methods for comparing purchasing power parities of currencies and living standards; measuring efficiency and productivity in private and public sector firms including benchmarking studies on Australian universities, health insurance companies, Queensland hospitals and aged care facilities; modeling income distributions with limited/aggregated data; measurement of regional and global inequality and poverty using international $/day international poverty lines; and measurement of health inequality using life table data. He conducted several large scale research and consulting projects for the World Bank, ADB and AFDB, FAO and ILO of the UN; and for Australian governmental organizations like the Department of Health and Ageing and DETYA.