Professor P.N. (Raja) Junankar was born and brought up in India, and his university education was in the UK. He obtained a B.Sc.(Econ) and M.Sc.(Econ) from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Essex.

He has held research and teaching appointments at the Universities of Durham, Essex, and Warwick in the UK, and visiting appointments at Northwestern University in the USA, Queen's University in Canada, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India, L'Universite Pantheon-Assas, Paris II, University of Lyon, France, Economics Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, and the University of Gezira, Sudan.

He left the University of Essex to join the Public Policy Program, Australian National University in 1988, where he was a Reader in Economics until December 1997. In 1998 he moved to the University of Western Sydney as a Professor.

He is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Sydney and Adjunct Professor in the Industrial Relations Research Centre, Australian School of Business, at the UNSW Canberra. He was a Professor of Economics at the University of Western Sydney, 1998-2009, and Head of Department from 1998 to 2000. He has several years of experience in managing a graduate program of education at the University of Essex and at the Public Policy Program at the Australian National University.

He has published numerous books and journal articles in macroeconomics, labour economics, and development economics. He has just published Economics of the Labour Market: Unemployment and the Costs of Unemployment;Development Economics: The Role of the Agricultural Sector in Development; The Economics of Immigration: The Impact of Immigration on the Australian Economy(all Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); edited The Economics of Unemployment (4 volumes), Edward Elgar,Cheltenham, 2000. He is an Executive Editor, Economic and Labour Relations Review from 2011. He is on the Editorial Boards of the International Review of Applied Economics, Australian Journal of Labour Economics, Middle East Business and Economic Review, Labour and Management in Development, International Journal of Development Issues.He also served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Development Studies from 1981-1997 and International Gambling Studies.

He has been a consultant for the European Commission,the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, International Labour Organisation, International Monetary Fund, Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN), the Indonesian Government and various government agencies in Australia.

Current research interests are in the field of labour economics (especially unemployment and long term unemployment), immigration, informal labour markets in developing countries, and macroeconomics.

He was a Visiting Fellow at the IZA in October 2001, and joined IZA as a Research Fellow in January 2002. He was a Visiting Research Fellow in March-April 2005, and August-September 2008.
In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW.