Philip Parker has taught courses on Global Competitive Strategy and other topics since 1988. His has also been Professor of International Strategy and Economics at the University of California, San Diego (IRPS). On sabbaticals he has taught courses at Harvard, the Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology, MIT (Sloan School), Stanford Univ. (GSB), and UCLA (Anderson School).

Parker received his Ph.D. in Business Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has Masters degrees in Finance and Banking (University of Aix-Marseille) and Managerial Economics (Wharton). His undergraduate degrees are in mathematics, biology and economics. He has consulted and/or taught courses in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, North America, and Europe.

Professor Parker's research has introduced the idea that physical sciences (physics and physiology) should be directly integrated into micro and macroeconomic models. This integration leads to new approaches to forecasting long-run economic behaviors, especially when making cross-country comparisons. He has applied this notion to innovation diffusion, economic growth, and economic geography.

Based on the idea that consumer utility and consumption functions are bounded by and must vary according to physical laws, he has written six books on the economic development and the economic divergence of nations. His most recent work was published by The MIT Press: Physioeconomics: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth (2000). In it, he forecasts global economic and demographic trends to the year 2100. In addition to arguing that critical economic axioms violate certain laws of physics (e.g. energy conservation), his work shows that economic convergence across nations, religions, or other cultural groups is unlikely, if not impossible, in the long run.

Earlier he published Climatic Effects on Individual, Social and Economic Behavior, followed by a four-volume encyclopedia called the Cross-Cultural Statistical Encyclopedia of the World which recasts international national economic statistics of the world into linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. He has published numerous articles in or served on the boards of academic journals spanning various disciplines, such as the Rand Journal of Economics, Marketing Science, Journal of International Business Studies, and International Journal of Forecasting.