Wednesday, April 17th
8:00 am – 7:30 pm ET
1957 E St NW, Washington DC
Elliott School of International Affairs
The Institute for International Economic Policy is pleased to announce that the Conference on The Future of Finance and Trade in Africa will take place on Wednesday, April 17th, 2024 at the Elliott School of International Affairs. This conference is co-sponsored by the GW School of Business, The Growth Dialogue, and Believe in Africa. Breakfast, lunch, and light refreshments will be provided.
Breakfast (8:00 – 9:00 am)
Welcome Remarks (9:00 – 9:15 am)
Ellen Granberg, President of George Washington University
Keynote Address (9:15 – 10:00 am)
The Honorable Wes Moore, Governor of Maryland
Meetings with Business Leaders by the Honorable Wes Moore (9:30 am, separate breakout room)
SESSION 1: Emerging Technologies for Inclusive Financial Services Delivery (9:30 – 10:40 am)
SESSION 2: Climate Finance and Financial Innovation (10:45-11:45 am)
LUNCH SESSION: Governors of Central Banks and the Future of African Finance (11:50 am – 1:20 pm)
Led by Danny Leipziger, Managing Director of The Growth Dialogue; Professor of Practice of International Business
SESSION 3: Financial Innovations Driving Africa’s Growth (1:30 – 2:40 pm)
Coffee Break (2:40 – 3:00 pm)
SESSION 4: U.S. Economic Policy in Africa: Supporting Progress on the Continent (3:00 – 4:00 pm)
Sponsors (4:00 – 4:30 pm)
Africa Open for Business (4:30 – 5:00 pm)
Closing Keynote Presentation (5:15 pm)
Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, U.S Representative for Florida’s 20th District
Reception (5:30 – 7:30 pm)
About the Keynote Speakers
Wes Moore is the 63rd Governor of the state of Maryland. He is Maryland’s first Black Governor in the state’s 246-year history, and is just the third African American elected Governor in the history of the United States. Moore is a proud graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and College, where he received an Associate’s degree in 1998, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Afterward, he went on to earn his Bachelor’s in international relations and economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. While at Johns Hopkins, Moore interned in the office of former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Moore was the first Black Rhodes Scholar in the history of Johns Hopkins University. As A Rhodes Scholar, he earned a Master’s in international relations from Wolfson College at Oxford. In 2005, Moore deployed to Afghanistan as a captain with the 82nd Airborne Division, leading soldiers in combat. Immediately upon returning home, Moore served as a White House Fellow, advising on issues of national security and international relations.
Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, the first Black woman to represent Florida’s 20th congressional district, was re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2023 to serve a second term. Congresswoman Cherfilus-McCormick is honored to serve on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs as the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Technology Modernization. She is also the Chair of the Diversity & Inclusion Task Force for the Democratic Women’s Caucus, a Co-Chair of the Haiti Caucus, and serves as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Congresswoman Cherfilus-McCormick earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Government from Howard University. In further pursuit of education, the Congresswoman also earned a Juris Doctorate from St. Thomas University. While in office, she remains committed to tackling the growing housing crisis, inadequate access to quality health care, and lack of equitable opportunities throughout her district and country.
Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics.
Christopher Fussner founded and owns TransTechnology Pte. Ltd. in Singapore in 1988, a major distributor of surface mount technology and semiconductor capital equipment. Headquartered in Singapore, Trans-Tec has 235 employees worldwide with offices in China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, United States, and Vietnam. He has had extensive experience in negotiating and establishing joint ventures, strategic alliances, licenses, distribution networks and sales worldwide. In addition, Mr. Fussner is also founder and owner of Certain Cellars Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, an importer and distributor of fine wines. Prior to forming these companies, Mr. Fussner headed Asia sales for Amistar Corporation based in Seoul, Korea and Singapore. As such, he was responsible for sales and service for electronics manufacturing industry machines in Australia, Asia, and India.
Kim Samuel is a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, where she studies the relationship between social isolation and multidimensional poverty as well as the broader link between human belonging and well-being. She is the founder of the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness and an academic lecturer at institutions including Oxford, Harvard, and McGill universities. Kim is the author of 
Prenika Anand is a Leslie Kirkley Visitor at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. Prenika has completed an MSc in Applied Digital Health from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. She holds a Masters degree in Health Administration from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and a Bachelor’s degree in Dental Surgery. Her professional experience includes product management and consulting for preventive health, workplace well-being, economic incentives for healthy behaviors and digital health management ecosystem.
Associate at OPHI and a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET), Argentina. Her research interests include the measurement and analysis of chronic and multidimensional poverty, the quality of education, its determinants, and its role for poverty persistence. She is particularly interested in Latin American countries.
James Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr., Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the FGT poverty measures, the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico). 
Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus is the founder of Grameen Bank, pioneering the concepts of microcredit and social business, founding more than 50 Social Business companies in Bangladesh. For his constant innovation and enterprise, the Fortune Magazine named Professor Yunus in March 2012 as “one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time.” At the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 Professor Yunus was conferred with the Olympic Laurel award for his extensive work in sports for development, bringing the concept of social business to the sports world.
is an expert in entrepreneurial strategy, skills development, and digital employee management platforms. She is the Founder of Global Talent Track, a leading vocational skills company that uses a blended learning model to bridge academia and the industry. She is the Co-Founder of 5F World, a platform for global consulting, investing, and mentoring in digital skills and digital transformation for start-ups and social enterprises, and has authored multiple books on knowledge, management, and digital success.
ational. He is a former Lead Economist at the World Bank and former consultant at the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and UNICEF. He previously was a Professor of Economics at Oxford University and Delhi University. He is an expert on topics including economic growth, macroeconomic policy, poverty, employment, entrepreneurship, urbanization, gender trade, decentralization, and agriculture.
is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University, the Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy and the Director of the ESIA Initiative on Climate Change and Sustainable Cities at George Washington University, and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab’s main fields of research are urban and real estate economics, development and growth, environmental economics, and labor economics. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, urban construction and climate change, the economic determinants and effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development and growth. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium.
atarajan is the Co-Founder of 5F World, a platform for global consulting, investing, and mentoring in digital skills and digital transformation for start-ups and social enterprises. He is the Chairman of Honeywell Automation India and Lighthouse Communities Foundation, as well as a Central Board Member of the State Bank of India, Global Talent Track, and AVPN Singapore.
is the Executive Chair and Founder of Harmonia Holdings Group, LLC. She serves on the Fairfax Economic Development Authority Board, Asian American Chamber of Commerce Board, George Mason University President’s Innovation Advisory Council, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) DC Board, Northern Virginia’s Chamber of Commerce Strategic Leadership Board of Advisors, and as an Officer of the Harvard Club of Washington DC. She was named one of the Top 25 Female CEOs in the DMV in 2008 and received the US President’s Volunteer Service Award in 2021
l is president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a policy-oriented research institution that opened its doors in Washington, DC in October 2001. Prior to launching the Center, Birdsall served for three years as senior associate and director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions.
Ana Palacio was the first woman to serve as Foreign Minister of Spain, from 2002-2004. Before this, she was a member of the Spanish Parliament, where she chaired the Joint Committee of the two Houses for European Affairs. She also served as a member of the European Parliament, where she chaired the Legal Affairs and Internal Market Committee, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee and the Conference of the Committee Chairs, the most senior decision-making body on legislative policy and programs. As the Head of the Spanish Delegation to the European Union’s Intergovernmental Conference and a member of the Presidium of the Convention, Ms. Palacio was at the forefront of the debate on the future of the European Union and drafted and led legal discussions on the European Treaties reform.
is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Distinguished Resident Scholar at the Emerging Markets Forum in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow at the Results for Development Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation. He is the co-founder and co-chair of the international Scaling Community of Practice, which has over 2,500 participants.
Sunil Sharma is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington DC, USA, and a Senior Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, Zurich, Switzerland. He was the Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department from 2015-2018, and the Director of the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute (STI) in Singapore from 2006-2015. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, Sunil was Chief of the IMF Institute’s Asian Division in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the IMF in 1992, he was on the Economics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Sarah Bloom Raskin, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, was named the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law in 2021. She is also a senior fellow in the Duke Center on Risk. Raskin was previously a visiting professor of the practice of law at Duke and a Rubenstein Fellow.
Timothy Lane served as Deputy Governor from February 2009 until his retirement from the Bank of Canada in September 2022.
James Talbot is Director of the International Department at the Bank of England. He is also the Chair of the Workstream on Monetary Policy of the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). James’ other roles at the Bank of England have included: Head of Monetary Assessment and Strategy Division, advising the MPC on Monetary Policy tools, implementation and strategy; working as a senior adviser on domestic and European macroprudential policy issues; and leading the preparation of the MPC’s quarterly UK forecast. James was UK Alternate Executive Director at the IMF from September 2008- September 2010.
Alexander Barkawi is the founder and director of CEP. Prior to his decision to build up CEP, he was the managing director of SAM Indexes and thus responsible for developing the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI) into a key reference point for sustainability investing. Before joining SAM, Alex took the lead in internationalizing the activities of oikos – an organization that today promotes sustainability in teaching and research of economics and management at more than 40 universities worldwide. Alex is a graduate in economics (M.A.) of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where he also wrote his PhD thesis on “Social Change in Egypt in the 1990s”. He grew up in Germany and Egypt and today lives in Zurich, Switzerland.
Sarah Dougherty focuses on financial regulations related to climate change and green banks, as well as growing finance and economics expertise within NRDC. Before joining NRDC in 2015, Dougherty worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta where she held various roles, including as a research analyst covering the energy industry, writing monetary policy briefs, and leading economic education in public affairs. She also helped to create the Green Bank Network of existing green banks, served on the Washington, D.C., Green Bank Advisory Committee to set up a city-level green bank, and worked in Chile and Mexico to support the nations’ green finance efforts. Other previous work includes positions at the Coalition for Green Capital, C2ES (a small solar EPC firm), and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. Dougherty holds a master’s degree in economics and is based in Atlanta.
Paul Hiebert heads the Systemic Risk and Financial Institutions Division of the European Central Bank (ECB). In this role, he leads systemic risk analysis for the euro area feeding into the ECB’s flagship Financial Stability Review, as well as macroprudential policy for the largest euro area banks. Since 2019 he has been leading climate-related risk and financial stability analysis with the corresponding publication of the ECB’s and ESRB’s annual report. His current role builds on over 20 years of experience within the ECB, the International Monetary Fund, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Canadian Department of Finance in various capacities—spanning economic, financial and policy functions for a wide range of countries. He has published on a diverse set of topics, including financial cycles, global banking, climate change issues, macroprudential policy, housing markets, and fiscal policy. He holds an M.A. in Economics from McGill University in Montréal.
Mark Levonian was most recently Managing Director and Global Head for Enterprise Economics and Risk Analysis at Promontory Financial Group. He was formerly Senior Deputy Comptroller for Economics at the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), where he served as a key advisor to the Comptroller before, during, and after the global financial crisis. Mark oversaw quantitative examination support and policy research for the OCC and was closely involved in policy responses to the financial crisis, including the development of bank stress testing. As a senior regulatory official and economist, he led or participated in various Basel Committee initiatives related to economic modeling and played a leading role in the development of rules and guidance for multiple generations of the Basel capital framework. Prior to joining the OCC, Mark was Vice President for Banking Supervision and Regulation and Economic Research Officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Manager of the Banking Studies Department at the New York Fed, Lecturer in Finance at the University of California’s Haas School of Business, and Senior Economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia. He has been an adviser/consultant to the World Bank, the IMF, and the central banks of Russia and Belarus.
William White is currently a Senior Fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto. He is also an Advisor to the Council on Economic Policies. From 2009 until March 2018, he served as Chair of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD in Paris. Prior to that, he spent fourteen years as Economic Adviser at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel. In that role, he was responsible for all BIS research, data collection, and the organization of meetings for central bankers from around the world. Before joining the BIS in 1994, he was the Deputy Governor responsible for international affairs at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa.
Harry Harding is Yushan Scholar and University Chair Professor in the College of Social Science at National Cheng Chi University in Taiwan and University Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the University of Virginia, where he is also a Faculty Senior Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He has previously held visiting or adjunct appointments at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the University of Washington, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Sydney, the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and National Cheng Chi University.
Anabel González (Costa Rica) has served as WTO Deputy Director-General since June 2021. Ms. González is a renowned global expert on trade, investment and economic development with a proven managerial track record in international organizations and the public sector. In government, Ms Gonzalez served as Minister of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica; Special Ambassador and Chief Negotiator; Vice-Minister of Trade and Director-General for Trade Negotiations. She also worked as Director-General of the Costa Rican Investment Promotion Agency (CINDE). Ms González also served at the World Bank as Senior Director of the Global Practice on Trade and Competitiveness, the WTO as Director of the Agriculture and Commodities Division and as Senior Consultant with the Inter-American Development Bank. More recently, Ms González has worked as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where she hosted the virtual series Trade Winds, and as Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group. Ms González obtained her master’s degree from Georgetown University Law Center with the highest academic distinction and has published extensively and lectured across the world on trade, investment and economic development.
Aaditya Mattoo is Chief Economist of the East Asia and Pacific Region of the World Bank. He specializes in development, trade and international cooperation, and provides policy advice to governments. He is also Co-Director of the World Development Report 2020 on Global Value Chains. Prior to this he was the Research Manager, Trade and Integration, at the World Bank. Before he joined the Bank, Mr. Mattoo was Economic Counsellor at the World Trade Organization and taught economics at the University of Sussex and Churchill College, Cambridge University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and an M.Phil in Economics from the University of Oxford. He has published on development, trade, trade in services, and international trade agreements in academic and other journals and his work has been cited in the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, and Time Magazine.
Richard Baldwin is Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva since 1991, and Editor-in-Chief of Vox since he founded it in June 2007. He was President/Director of CEPR (2014-2018), and a visiting professor at Oxford (2012-2015), and MIT (2003). In terms of government service, he was a Senior Staff Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisors in the Bush Administration (1990-1991) on leave from Columbia University Business School where he was Associate Professor. He did his PhD in Economics at MIT with Paul Krugman with whom he has co-authored several articles. He advises governments and international organisation around the world, and is the author of numerous books and articles on international trade, globalisation, regionalism, and European integration. His 2016 book, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalisation, was listed by Lawrence Summers as one of the five most important books on globalisation ever. His latest book, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work, was published in February 2019.
Dr. Danny Leipziger is a Professor of International Business and International Affairs at the George Washington University and Director of the Growth Dialogue. He is a faculty affiliate of the Institute for International Economic Policy. Prior to joining GW, Prof. Leipziger was Vice President for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management at the World Bank (2004-2009). Dr. Leipziger held senior management positions in East Asia and Latin America Regions. He was the World Bank’s Director for Finance, Private Sector, and Infrastructure for Latin America (1998-2004). He served previously in the U.S. Department of State and was a Member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff. Dr. Leipziger was Vice Chair of the Spence Commission on Growth and Development, and he served on the WEF Council on Economic Progress.
is Associate Editor and Chief Economics correspondent at the Financial Times. Prior to that he was a senior economist at the World Bank and Director of Studies at the Trade Policy Research Centre, in London. Larry Summers described him as “the world’s preeminent financial journalist,” while economist Kenneth Rogoff has said “He really is the premier financial and economics writer in the world.” Wolf was joint winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for excellence in financial journalism in both 1989 and 1997. He won the RTZ David Watt memorial prize in 1994. In 2000. Wolf was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire). He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by the University of Nottingham in 2006, and was made Doctor of Science (Economics) of University of London, honoris causa, by the London School of Economics in the same year. In 2018, on the occasion of the KU Leuven Patron Saint‘s Day he received a doctorate honoris causa of the university. In 2019, Wolf received the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Joe Zammit-Lucia With extensive experience in the business and political worlds, Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia is an adviser to business leaders focused on leadership in contemporary socio-political culture, an author, public speaker and commentator in the international press on the inter-relationship between business and politics.
is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington DC, USA, and a Senior Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, Zurich, Switzerland. He was Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department from 2015-2018, and the Director of the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute (STI) in Singapore from 2006-2015. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, Sunil was Chief of the IMF Institute’s Asian Division in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the IMF in 1992, he was on the Economics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Putu Natih supports the OPHI Outreach team and is also a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia (FEB UI), where she teaches Econometrics for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Putu is also currently supporting Indonesia’s Coordinating Ministry for Human Development and Culture, as a social protection specialist. Before OPHI and FEB UI, Putu was a Statistics Tutor at Keble and St John’s Colleges at the University of Oxford. She also worked as a Research Assistant at the Blavatnik School of Government within a project on digital inequality. Putu completed her undergraduate degree at the Faculty of Economics, Universitas Indonesia and was a Jardine-Oxford Scholar at Trinity College, the University of Oxford, where she studied for her MPhil and DPhil.
Sola Afolayan works at The Presidency, and is the National Coordinator of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) project, in Nigeria. The MPI; a poverty measurement and policy tool, is an intervention under the Nigerian Government’s National Poverty Reduction with Growth Strategy (NPRGS), which is used in complement with monetary poverty measurement, to understand the country’s poverty dynamics.In the last 22 years, Sola has led teams and held leadership positions across 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. At these roles, she sought to shape policy discourses in poverty reduction, social protection, budget performance, infrastructure financing, rural electrification, gender related issues, and in deploying public-private partnerships to address conflicts in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.She describes her career highlight as the recent launch of the Nigeria MPI report by the President of Nigeria, and also in 2015 when she helped set up the framework for a GBP 37 Million programme, where 186kWp solar Photovoltaic (PV) systems each were installed at 11 Clinics and 172 public schools in rural and per-urban areas of Lagos State; resulting in positive health and education outcomes, with over 140,000 homes being solar powered.
Nicolai Suppa is a Research Associate at OPHI and a Juan de la Cierva Research Fellow at the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. At OPHI, he works on several research projects. Since 2018, he also co-leads the estimation of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI), together with Usha Kanagaratnam and Sabina Alkire.
Kirsten Sehnbruch is a Global Professor of the British Academy and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Universidad de Chile, and a Senior Lecturer at the University of California, at Berkeley.
Mauricio Apablaza is director of research at the School of Government at the Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile, research associate of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at Oxford University and Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Mauricio is also the director of the programme Conocimiento e Investigación en Personas Mayores (CIPEM) and president of the Chilean Commission for Quality of Employment and former member of the Chilean commission of experts on informal labour. Previously, he worked as Research Officer and Outreach Coordinator at OPHI, at the University of Oxford. Mauricio holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham and a postdoc at the University of Oxford. His research areas and publications focus on institutions, multidimensionality, and poverty dynamics.
Josefin Pasanen works as a Research & Partnerships Specialist at the UNDP Human Development Report Office (HDRO). Prior to joining HDRO, she was head of Capacity Building at the Latin America & Caribbean Office of Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL LAC), where she led a team that supported government, NGO, and private sector partners across the region to develop capacities for evidence-based policymaking, research, monitoring and evaluation. She is a development economist by training and holds an MSc In Local Economic Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BSc in Economics and Political Science from Uppsala University. Josefin’s previous experience also includes research at the Swedish Agency for Public Management and the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, and policy advisory for the Mayor ́s office at the City of Stockholm.
Vladimir Hlasny, economic affairs officer with UN-ESCWA (Beirut), Poverty and inequality research team. Previously an associate professor of Economics at Ewha Womans University (Seoul). His work is on labor market conditions and the distribution of economic outcomes in Asia and the Middle East. His research has been published in general-interest journals including the World Bank Economic Review, Review of Income and Wealth, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Development and Change, and Social Science Quarterly. PhD in Economics from Michigan State University.
Hassan Hamie, economist with UN-ESCWA (Beirut), Poverty and inequality research team. Previously worked as an engineer for the Lebanese Petroleum Administration. Currently working on the topics of poverty, Inequality and inclusive development. PhD in Energy Economics from Technical University of Vienna.
Paul Makdissi is a professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Ottawa. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality. Previously he has held positions at the Université de Sherbrooke (Canada) and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands). His main areas of research are socioeconomic health inequality measurement, the distributive impact of taxation and public pricing, and income inequality measurement. He was the president of the Société canadienne de science économique (the French Canadian economics association) for the 2021-2022 academic year. From 2017 to 2019, he was the thematic leader for the Equity and Inclusive Growth research theme for the Economic Research Forum for the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey. He has also been a consultant for many federal and provincial ministries and agencies in Canada, the World Bank, and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.
Susan Shirk is a research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center. She is one of the most influential experts working on U.S.-China relations and Chinese politics. She is also director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).
Suman Seth is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Leeds University Business School and an honorary Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). He had previously been a Research Officer and a Senior Research Officer at OPHI between 2010 and 2015. He is primarily interested in Development Economics with a particular emphasis on measurement methodologies and policy-oriented applications. Previously, he has served as consultants to the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the Development Research Groups at the World Bank, and to the Asian Development Bank. He has co-authored a book on income poverty measurement with the World Bank and a book on multidimensional poverty with OPHI colleagues.
Fanni Kovesdi (Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Department of International Development, University of Oxford)
Scott M. Moore is a political scientist, university administrator, and former policymaker whose career focuses on China, sustainability, and emerging technology. As Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Moore works with faculty members from across the University to design, implement, and highlight innovative, high-impact global research initiatives in areas including sustainability and emerging technology. Dr. Moore directs Penn Global’s four research and engagement fund programs, including those designed to support faculty-led projects in China, India, and Africa as well as its At-Risk Scholars Program. In addition, Dr. Moore conducts research as an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and The Water Center at Penn, and teaches in the Department of Political Science.
interested in understanding the factors that shape technological change, with a particular focus on transitioning to more sustainable and energy-saving technologies. Within this broader category, he studies consumer preferences and market demand for new technologies as well as relationships between innovation, industry structure, and technology policy. He has explored these themes in the context of China’s rapidly developing electric vehicle industry. He applies an interdisciplinary approach to research, with expertise in discrete choice modeling and conjoint analysis as well as interview-based case studies.
Barbara Stallings is a William R. Rhodes Research Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of Studies in Comparative International Development. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University. Before arriving at Brown in 2002, she was director of the Economic Development Division of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, Chile (1993–2002), and professor of political economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1977–1993). She has doctorates in economics (University of Cambridge) and in political science (Stanford University) and is a specialist in development economics, with an emphasis on development strategies and international finance. In addition, she works on issues of economic relations between Asia and Latin America and comparisons between the two regions. Her recent books are Innovation and Inclusion in Latin America: Strategies to Avoid the Middle Income Trap (2016) and Promoting Development: The Political Economy of East Asian Foreign Aid (2017). Her most recent book, 
James Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr., Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the FGT poverty measures, the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).
Ricardo Nogales (Universidad Privada de Bolivia and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford)
Sabina Alkire, is the Professor of Poverty and Human Development and directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked at the George Washington University, Harvard University, the Human Security Commission, and the World Bank. She has a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. Together with Professor James Foster, Sabina developed the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty, a flexible technique that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to each context. With colleagues at OPHI, this has been applied and implemented empirically to produce a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they suffer. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which can be unpacked to provide a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator.
Herizo Andrianandrasana, is a Researcher for the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Herizo is using remote sensing and GIS techniques to look at key environmental variables that can be associated with the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). He is now working with Sabina Alkire and Dyah Pritadrajati to write a paper on changes in MPI and environmental deprivations in Madagascar. Herizo completed his DPhil in 2017 at the Oxford Long Term Ecology Lab (OxLEL) Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. To OPHI’s knowledge, he is the first Malagasy person to be awarded a doctorate degree at the University of Oxford. He is a conservation practitioner with 18 years’ experience in community-based conservation approach including participatory ecological monitoring in Madagascar. He won the 2014 Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa, presented by HRH Prince William, and the 2006 Ramsar Crane Bank Award.
Alexandra Fortacz, works as a Research Analyst for OPHI, advising and producing policy briefs and supporting research projects. She has previously worked in international relations and development in Uganda and Strasbourg, for governmental, non-governmental, and international institutions. Alexandra holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a BA in Political Science from the University of Vienna. Her research interests include conflict and peace, the capability approach, multidimensional poverty, human development, human rights, and citizenship.
Frank Vollmer, is a Researcher for the OPHI, joining in January 2018 to support the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI) team. He is also a Lecturer in development economics at the University Jaume I, Spain. Prior to joining OPHI, Frank worked at the University of Edinburgh as a Research Associate in Agriculture and Rural Development. He also worked as a Research Fellow in Effective Development Cooperation at the German Development Institute. He has a PhD in Peace, Conflict and Development Studies from University Jaume I in Spain, and a Masters in Peace and Development Studies from University of Limerick. His research interests include measurement and determinants analysis of multidimensional poverty, and livelihood analyses, including ecosystem services for poverty alleviation assessments. His main geographical focus is on sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Mozambique. 
Dr Han Wang, is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. His current research can be divided into two strands: firstly, exploring the relationship between local institutions and sustainable growth. Secondly, seeking credible strategies to reduce socio-economic inequalities. Han did his PhD in Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. During his PhD studies, he completed research consultancy work for ADB, EBRD and OECD. Wang’s research covers Asia and Europe.
Yu-Chieh Hsu (Human Development Report Office)
Tasneem Mirza (United Nations Development Programme)
Catherina Pattillo is a Deputy Director in the IMF’s African Department where she oversees work on several countries, as well as on climate change, capacity development, gender and research. Since joining the Fund from a position at Oxford University, she has worked in the Fiscal Affairs Department where she was chief of the division responsible for the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor, the Research Department, and on countries in Africa and the Caribbean, and the Strategy, Policy and Review Department where she worked on low-income country issues, and emerging issues such as gender, inequality, and climate change. She has published in these areas, as well as on Sustainable Development Goals, firm dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa, growth, investment, debt, monetary and exchange rate policies, aid, and currency crises. She received her Ph.D in Economics from Yale University.
Steve Suranovic 
Ivanova Reyes is an economist working in the Regional Studies Division of the International Monetary Fund’s African Department. Prior to joining the IMF, she worked at Gettysburg College, the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Ministry of Economy of the Dominican Republic (DR), Superintendency of Pensions of the DR and Pontificia Universidad Catolica (PUCMM) of DR. She holds a PhD in Economics from American University, a masters in economics from Georgetown University and a masters in applied macroeconomics from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica (PUC) of Chile. Her research is focused on analyzing the impact of China’s economy on Latin America and the Caribbean.
Qianqian Zhang is an economist in the African Department at the IMF. Her research interests include fiscal policy, fiscal decentralization, gender, and development issues. She previously worked in the Fiscal Affairs Department and as a country economist for Afghanistan. She received her PhD from George Washington University and her master’s degree from Cornell University.
Moses Kansanga is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Affairs at The George Washington University. He is a critical geographer whose research explores questions at the intersection of sustainable food systems and natural resource management from a political ecology perspective. For the past decade, Moses has worked with smallholder farming communities in the Global South with concentration on sustainable agriculture and natural resource politics. He received his PHD at University of Western Ontario.
Robert Weiner is the director of the Master of Science in International Business program and a professor of international business, public policy & public administration, and international affairs at the George Washington University School of Business, Washington D.C. He serves concurrently as deputy director of the Master of Science in Government Contracts, a joint program of the GW Schools of Business and Law. He is a faculty director of the Business School’s Center for International Business Education and Research, and an affiliate of the Elliott School of International Affairs’ Institute for International Economic Policy, Institute for Middle East Studies, Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, and Sigur Center for Asian Studies. He is also senior advisor to the Brattle Group. He received his PhD from Harvard University.
Patrick Hyland, MA ’03, is a managing director in the Global Client Business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management and also serves as co-chair of the Separate Account and Advisory Working Group. He joined Goldman Sachs in 2010 as a vice president in the Platform Solutions Group within the Investment Management Division and was named managing director in 2021. Prior to joining the firm, Patrick was vice president and manager in Client Service at OppenheimerFunds. He is also an Executive Circle member of the Elliott School’s Institute for International Economic Policy.
Persis Khambatta, MA ’07, is director of global government affairs for India and South Asia at Walmart. Previously, she spent eight years with BowerGroupAsia, managing key client relationships across South Asia, providing political-economic analyses, mapping, regulatory monitoring and country strategies. Khambatta also served as a fellow and adjunct fellow for the Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as a program officer and consultant at The Asia Foundation.
Moderator:
Linda Tsao Yang is an ambassador (retired). Linda Tsao Yang served as U.S. Executive Director to the board of the Asian Development Bank in Manila from 1993 to1999. She was appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate in 1993, the first woman and the first minority to represent the United States on the board of a multilateral financial institution. Yang Is Chair Emerita of the Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA) based in Hong Kong which she chaired from 2001 to 2014. From 2003 to 2010, she served on the board of the Bank of China (Hong Kong) – one of three banknote issuing banks in Hong Kong – as an independent non-executive director. Earlier in her career, she was the first minority appointed to serve as California’s Savings and Loan Commissioner; she was also the first minority appointed to the board of the California Public Employees Retirement System ( CalPERS), the largest public pension fund in the United States. She was Vice-Chairman of the Investment Committee of the board and was unanimously elected by her fellow board members to the position of Vice President of the Board.Yang was an invited panelist on International Economy at the economic summit led by then President-elect Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas in December 1992.
Chantale Wong has had a long and distinguished career in public service, currently serving as the US Executive Director to the Asian Development Bank in Manila. Wong is the first out lesbian and first LGBTQ+ person of color appointed to an ambassador-level position in US history, confirmed by the senate in February 2022. Previously, Wong was appointed by President Obama to serve as Vice President for Administration and Finance, and Chief Financial Officer at the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Earlier in her career, Wong has held leadership positions at the Office of Management and Budget, Departments of Treasury and Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, in addition to NASA. Chantale joined the staff of the Asian Development Bank in 1999 as an environmental specialist to ensure the Bank’s assessments complied with their environmental and social policies. She led development and publication of ADB’s first Asian Environment Outlook (2001), and was subsequently appointed by President Bill Clinton to its Board of Directors, representing the US as the Alternate Executive Director to oversee operations. Wong was the founding chair of the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership (CAPAL), an organization dedicated to encouraging careers in public service by providing training, workshops, mentors, and work opportunities for young AAPIs.
Julia Chang Bloch is founding president of the US-China Education Trust. She was the first US ambassador of Asian descent in US history. She has had an extensive career in international affairs and government service, beginning in 1964 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sabah, Malaysia and culminating as U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Nepal in 1989. From 1981 to 1988, Ambassador Bloch served at the U.S. Agency for International Development as Assistant Administrator of Food for Peace and Voluntary Assistance and as Assistant Administrator for Asia and the Near East, positions appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. She also was the Chief Minority Counsel to a Senate Select Committee; a Senate professional staff member; the Deputy Director of the Office of African Affairs at the U.S. Information Agency; a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and an Associate of the U.S.- Japan Relations Program of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard.
Jason Miklian, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo. Miklian has published over 60 academic and policy works on issues of conflict and crisis, based on extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, Colombia, India, and the Congo. He serves on the United Nations Expert Panel on Business and Human Rights, has won several awards for his academic publications, and serves as an expert resource for various government knowledge banks in the US, UK, EU and Norway. Miklian has also written for or been cited in an expert capacity by the New York Times, BBC, The Economist, Washington Post, Financial Times, France 24, The Guardian, The Hindu (India) and NPR.
Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist, as well as the author of the New York Times bestseller What Doesn’t Kill Us. He spent six years living in South Asia as a contributing editor for WIRED and writer for Mother Jones, NPR, Discover Magazine, Fast Company, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. His other books include The Red Market, The Enlightenment Trap and The Wedge. He is the founder of Foxtopus Ink, a Denver-based media company.
is is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, India-China relations, and Asian regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the 
is a John O. Rankin Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Elliott School’s 
Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the Government of India between 2014 and 2018, is now Senior Fellow, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development. Previously, he was Professor at Ashoka University (2020-21), taught at the Harvard Kennedy School (2018-2020), and was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (2011-2014). Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers in 2011. As CEA, he oversaw the publication of the annual Economic Survey of India, which became a widely read document on Indian economic policy and development. For example, the 2018 Survey had 20 million views from over 190 countries in its first year of publication. Among the major ideas and policies he initiated and helped implement were a simplified goods and services tax (GST), attempts to tackle the Twin Balance Sheet challenge, creating the financial and digital platform for connectivity (the so-called JAM trinity), charting a new fiscal framework, and Universal Basic Income. Announcing his departure as CEA, the former Finance Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley wrote a Facebook post, 
Dr. Kalpana Kochhar is Director, Development Policy and Finance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prior to taking this position, she spent 33 years at the IMF, ending her career there as the Director of the Human Resources Department of the IMF between 2016 and 2021. She has also held positions as Deputy Director in the Asia and Pacific Department of the IMF where she worked on India, China, Korea, Japan and several other Asian countries, and in the Strategy, Policy and Review Department where she launched the IMF’s work on the macroeconomic implications of gender inequality and women’s economic empowerment. Between 2010 and 2012, she was seconded to the World Bank as the Chief Economist for the South Asia Region of the World Bank. Ms. Kochhar’s research interests and publications have been on emerging markets including India and China, and jobs and inclusive growth, gender and inequality issues, structural reforms, and regional integration in South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Brown University and an M.A. in Economics from Delhi School of Economics in India. She has a B.A in Economics from Madras University in India.
is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and host of the Brookings trade podcast, 
Melanie Morten is a development economist who focuses on the migration of low-income people. Human mobility has long helped to determine people’s living conditions. Individuals move, both across and within countries, searching for better employment prospects, higher wages, and other opportunities. Beyond impacting individuals’ own outcomes, migration sometimes occurs at such a large scale that it affects the overall organization of economic activity within countries. Her work explores the causes and effects of different types of movement, including internal and international migration, temporary and permanent relocations, and within-city residential movements. She considers both the microeconomic and macroeconomic implications of migration and formulate spatial equilibrium models to understand how impacts in one location may spill over to other areas. Her research has been supported by several grants, including an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Fellowship.
Dr. Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directs the Global Health Governance roundtable series. He is also a professor and the director of global health studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional schools of international affairs that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm.
Michael Moore received his B.A. in liberal arts from the University of Texas at Austin and his M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is Director of the Masters of Arts in International Economic Policy program and has been a faculty member at the Elliott School since receiving his doctorate in 1988. Professor Moore teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in international trade theory and policy as well as international macroeconomics. He also has taught international economics to US diplomats at the Foreign Service Institute and students at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris. He has published in numerous academic journals including the Journal of International Economics, International Trade Journal, Canadian Journal of Economics, Review of International Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, and Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, and has been a contributor to five books. His commentary has appeared in numerous media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Financial Times, CNN, CBC, NPR, and NBC.
Nick Tsivanidis is an Assistant Professor in the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. I am also Co-Director of the Cities Research Programme at the International Growth Centre (IGC). His interests lie across urban and spatial economics, development and applied macroeconomics. My research centers on connecting theory with empirics that combine new sources of granular data with natural experiments to learn about the process of urbanization in developing countries.
Alyssa Ayres is the Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Her work focuses primarily on India’s role in the world and on U.S. relations with South Asia in the larger Indo-Pacific. Before joining the Elliott School, she was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia under the Obama administration. She holds a Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.
Jay Shambaugh is Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Jay is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Jay taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.
Kevin Rudd is a former Prime Minister of Australia and current President and CEO of the Asia Society. He became President and CEO of Asia Society in January 2021 and has been president of the Asia Society Policy Institute since January 2015. He served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning as Prime Minister in 2013. He is also a leading international authority on China. He began his career as a China scholar, serving as an Australian diplomat in Beijing before entering Australian politics.
David Shambaugh is an internationally recognized authority and award-winning author on contemporary China and the international relations of Asia. He currently is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and the founding Director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He was also a formerly a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution and Director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Kevin Cromar is the Director of the Health, Environment, and Policy Program at the Marron Institute of Urban Management and an Associate Professor of Environmental Medicine and Population Health at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. His research program works at the intersection of scientific research and public policy in order to generate the knowledge needed to improve health and quality of life. He has a BS in Neuroscience from Brigham Young University and an MS and PhD in Environmental Health Science from New York University. 
Noah Scovronick is a professor of Environmental Health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. His areas of interest include air pollution, climate and health, and environmental health. He has a BS from Emory University, a MS from University of Cape Town, an MS and a PhD from the London School fo Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Susan Anenberg is the Director of the Climate and Health Institute and an Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health and of Global Health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Dr. Anenberg’s research focuses on the health implications of air pollution and climate change, from local to global scales. She currently serves on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, the World Health Organization’s Global Air Pollution and Health Technical Advisory Group, and the National Academy of Science’s Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program. She also serves as Secretary of the GeoHealth section of the American Geophysical Union. Previously, Dr. Anenberg was a Co-Founder and Partner at Environmental Health Analytics, LLC, the Deputy Managing Director for Recommendations at the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an environmental scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a senior advisor for clean cookstove initiatives at the U.S. State Department.
Jay Shambaugh is Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Jay is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Jay taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.
Mauricio Gallardo is Associate Professor at Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile where he teaches Econometrics and Statistical Methods. He holds a master’s degree in Philosophy from Saint Petersburg State University in Russia, a master’s degree in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina. Before entering the academy, he worked for the Statistical Division at the Central Bank of Chile. He has also worked providing technical assistance to international organizations on statistical issues. His research interests are related to poverty, vulnerability, and inequality of opportunities.
Stefan Sperlich made his diploma in mathematics at the University of Göttingen and holds a PhD in economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 1998 to 2006 he was Professor for statistics at the University Carlos III de Madrid, from 2006 to 2010 chair of econometrics at the University of Göttingen, and is since 2010 professor for statistics and econometrics at the University of Geneva. His research interests are ranging from nonparametric statistics over small area statistics to empirical economics, in particular impact evaluation methods. He has been working since about 15 years as consultant for regional, national and international institutions, participated in development programs like EUROSOCIAL, is cofounder of the research center ‘Poverty, Equity and Growth in Developing Countries’ at the University of Göttingen, and is research fellow at the Center for Evaluation and Development (Mannheim, Germany). He published in various top ranked scientific journals of different fields and was awarded with the Koopmans econometric theory prize (among others).
Dr. Sekhar Bonu joined as the Director General of Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) in April 2019. The Government established DMEO in September 2015 as an attached office of the NITI Aayog to fulfil the monitoring and evaluation mandates assigned to NITI Aayog. Before joining NITI Aayog, Dr. Bonu worked with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila for 15 years. At ADB, he worked in health, urban infrastructure development and regional cooperation, mainly in South Asia. Dr. Bonu worked in the Indian Administrative Services and served as a civil servant in Rajasthan between 1987-2003, among others, as district magistrate, director of primary and secondary education, chief executive officer of state-owned Enterprises. Dr. Sekhar Bonu has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is a Chartered Financial Analyst charter holder. He has a wide range of research and operational interests and has published in peer-review journals.
Christian Oldiges is a Development Economist, currently serving as Policy Specialist at the Inclusive Growth team of UNDP/BPPS, New York. He brings more than 10 years of experience in the fields of development economics, policy advocacy and social protection. Previously, as Director of Policy Research at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford, he has been directly involved in developing national MPIs with governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In postdoctoral studies at Oxford, he has written about how 270 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty in India within a decade, poverty reduction and its interlinkages with COVID-19, migration, and conflict, as well as on workfare programs and food security in India. He holds a PhD in Economics (Heidelberg University, Germany) and has studied at Hindu College and the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.
Daniel Yi Xu is a Professor of Economics at Duke University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is also the associate editor of the Rand Journal of Economics and AEJ: Applied. His research focus tends to focus on Productivity/Innovation, International Trade, and Industrial Organization. His website: 
Trevon Logan is the Hazel C. Youngberg Distinguished Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University. Professor Logan specializes in economic history, economic demography and applied microeconomics. His research in economic history concerns the development of living standards measures that can be used to directly assess the question of how the human condition has changed over time. He applies the techniques of contemporary living standard measurements to the past as a means of deriving consistent estimates of well-being over time. Most of his historical work uses historical household surveys, but also includes some new data to look at topics such as the returns to education in the early twentieth century, the formation of tastes, and the allocation of resources within the household. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
Shari Eli is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her fields of research are economic history, health economics and demography. One section of her research explores the ways in which individuals of low socioeconomic status used cash transfers to improve their health status over the course of the lifecycle. Another section explores the intergenerational persistence of welfare receipt as well as the relationship between social assistance and marriage decisions.
John J. Clegg is an historical sociologist working on the roots of mass incarceration in the United States and the comparative political economy of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world.
ugh is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Jay is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Jay taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.
Adriana Stankiewicz Serra is a Research Associate at the Institute of Economics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.
Iñaki Permanyer, an ICREA Research Professor working at the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Sam Jones is a Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER based in Mozambique, on extended leave from his position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen. He is a versatile economist with expertise in microeconomic empirical methods, education, labour markets, development finance (including foreign aid) and policy macroeconomics. Sam’s work has been published in leading journals, such as Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Economic Inequality, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, African Development Review, and Journal of African Economies. Much of Sam’s academic research has focused on sub-Saharan Africa and he has previously worked extensively in Mozambique, spending over ten years as an advisor in the Ministry of Finance.
Guido Alfani is Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). He is also an Affiliated Scholar of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, New York (U.S.). An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he published extensively on inequality and social mobility in the long run, on the history of epidemics (especially of plague) and of famines, and on systems of social alliance. Recent works include The Lion’s Share. Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (2019, with Matteo Di Tullio) and Famine in European History (2017, with Cormac Ó Gráda). During 2012-16 he was the Principal Investigator of the project EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800 (
Abigail Agresta is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University. Her research examines the religious, environmental, and public health history of the medieval Crown of Aragon. Her first monograph, The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia, will be published by Cornell University Press in July 2022.
Trevor Jackson is an assistant professor of economic history at George Washington University, where he teaches the history of inequality and economic crisis. He works on early modern European economic history, with an emphasis on inequality and financial crisis. His book manuscript, Impunity and Capitalism: Afterlives of European Financial Crisis, 1680-1830, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. It examines how changes in the scope for prosecutorial discretion, technical complexity, and the international mobility of capital diffused the capacity to act with impunity in the economy across the very long eighteenth century. The project argues that impunity has shifted from the sole possession of a legally-immune sovereign to a functional characteristic of technically-skilled professional managers of capital, to an imagined quality of markets themselves, such that a constituent element of the modern economic sphere is that within it, great harm can and will happen to great many people, and nobody will be at fault. Dr. Jackson has taught courses on international economic history ranging from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as well as courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crisis, and the history of human rights. Prior to joining the faculty at the George Washington University, he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley.
William White is currently a Senior Fellow at the C D Howe Institute in Toronto. From 2009 until March 2018, he served as Chair of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD in Paris. Prior to that, he spent fourteen years as Economic Adviser at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel. In that role, he was responsible for all BIS research, data collection, and the organization of meetings for central bankers from around the world. Before joining the BIS in 1994, he was the Deputy Governor responsible for international affairs at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa.
Martha Finnemore is University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on global governance, international organizations, cybersecurity, ethics, and social theory. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a non-resident scholar at the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been a visiting research fellow at the Brookings Institution and Stanford University, and has received fellowships or grants from the MacArthur Foundation, DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative, the Social Science Research Council, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace.
Sunil Sharma is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington DC, USA, and a Senior Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, Zurich, Switzerland. He was Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department from 2015-2018, and the Director of the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute (STI) in Singapore from 2006-2015. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, Sunil was Chief of the IMF Institute’s Asian Division in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the IMF in 1992, he was on the Economics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Sunil has a Ph.D. and a M.A. in Economics from Cornell University, a M.A. from the Delhi School of Economics, and a B.A. (Honors) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. He has published widely on economic and financial topics, and his current interests include governance, systemic hazards, complex systems, the international financial architecture, and the institutional structure and design of financial regulation.
Peter Dietsch is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. His research focuses on issues of economic ethics, notably on tax justice, normative dimensions of monetary policy, and on income inequalities. Dietsch is the author of Catching Capital – The Ethics of Tax Competition (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-author of Do Central Banks Serve the People? (Polity Press, 2018), and co-editor of Global Tax Governance – What is Wrong with It and How to Fix It (ECPR Press, 2016). He has published numerous articles and book chapters, and is a regular contributor in the media on debates in his field. Dietsch received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in 2021 and was nominated to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017. Prior to the University of Victoria, Dietsch taught at the Université de Montréal for 16 years. He has been a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, at the European University Institute in Florence, and at the University of Victoria.
Nitin Desai has had a long and distinguished career in the Government of India and the United Nations. He has also worked for some time in private industry and taught at two UK Universities.
Sunil Sharma is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA, and a Senior Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, Zurich, Switzerland. He was Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department from 2015-2018, and the Director of the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute (STI) in Singapore from 2006-2015. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, he was Chief of the IMF Institute’s Asian Division in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the IMF in 1992, Dr. Sharma was on the Economics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Cornell University, and his current interests include rethinking capitalism and democracy, systemic hazards, complex systems, the international financial architecture, and the institutional structure and design of financial regulation.
Nicoletta Batini is the Lead Evaluator of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Independent Evaluation Office. Prior to the IMF, she was Advisor of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey, and Director of the International Economics and Policy Office of the Treasury in Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in international finance (S.S.S.U.P. S. Anna) and a Ph.D. in monetary economics (University of Oxford). Today her research focuses on the economics of energy and land and sea use transitions for climate mitigation. Her new book “The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for People and the Planet” was just published by Island Press and the International Monetary Fund.
Bruce Friedrich is co-founder and executive director of the Good Food Institute. With branches in the United States, India, Israel, Brazil, Europe, and Asia Pacific, GFI is accelerating the production of plant-based and cultivated meat in order to bolster the global protein supply while protecting our environment, promoting global health, and preventing food insecurity. Bruce oversees GFI’s global strategy, working with directors and international managing directors to ensure that GFI is maximally effective at delivering mission-focused results. Bruce graduated from Georgetown Law and also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics. Bruce was named 2021 “American Food Hero” by @EatingWell Magazine.
Nathan Nunn is Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in political economy, economic history, economic development, cultural economics, and international trade. He is an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, a Research Fellow at BREAD, a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA), and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Boundaries, Membership & Belonging program. One stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the historical and dynamic process of economic development. In particular, he has studied the factors that shape differences in the evolution of institutions and cultures across societies. He has published research that studies the historical process of a wide range of factors that are crucial for economic development, including distrust, gender norms, religiosity, norms of rule-following, conflict, immigration, state formation, and support for democracy. His current research interests lie in better understanding the importance of local culture and context for economic policies, particularly in developing countries.
Rémi Jedwab is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab’s main fields of research are development and growth, urban economics, labor economics and political economy. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, the relationship between population growth and economic growth, the economic effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Urban Economics. Finally, he is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and Regional Science and Urban Economics.
Mathias Thoenig is a Professor of Economics at the School of Business and Economics (HEC) at the University of Lausanne, a CEPR Research Fellow in the international trade and macro programs and an elected Council Member of the European Economic Association. He is a Distinguished Scholar at IMD Business School and a Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Mathias Thoenig received his Ph.D. from University Paris-1 Sorbonne and his B.A. in engineering from Ecole Polytechnique. He has held visiting appointments at International Monetary Fund, MIT, SciencesPo Paris, University of British Columbia and University Pompeu Fabra. He also served on the editorial boards of Journal of European Economic Association and International Economics. His research interests include development, international trade and political economy of conflicts and migration. He has published and forthcoming papers in several international journals, including, among others: American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Harvard Business Review, Journal of European Economic Association. He has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2013 for his work on the role of distrust and grievances in ethnic conflicts.
Mathieu Couttenier has obtained his PhD in Economics in 2011 at the University Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics. Before to join the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon as Professor, he was post-doc at the University of Lausanne and assistant professor at the University of Geneva. He was also visiting researcher at the department of political sciences at Stanford and at the economic department at Sciences Po Paris. His research is filled with interactions between economics and political sciences but also cultural, institutional and geographical issues. He focuses on microeconomic questions, in particular in the fields of applied political economy and economic development. His main research interests are in the understanding of violence and civil wars. He has published many academic papers on the role played by income shocks, natural resources or climate on the diffusion of conflicts over space and time. Some of his present research agenda also studies the role of natural resources in the local economic development. He has published in many leading peer-refereed journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Comparative Economics.
Elena Esposito is Assistant Professor at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. She is an applied economist with research interests in the fields of development economics, economic growth, political economy, and economic history. Elena Esposito earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bologna in 2014 and she joined the department of Economics at the European University Institute (Italy) as “Max Weber Fellow”. She spent research periods at the departments of economics at universities in the USA. She also worked as an economic researcher and consultant for several international organizations, participating to projects with UNICEF, the European Commission and the World Bank, among others.
Eoin McGuirk is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Neubauer Faculty Fellow at Tufts University. His research interests are in development and political economics, with a particular focus on the causes and consequences of political violence and social divisions. In his research, he has examined how variation in world food prices can affect the type and location of conflict events in Africa, and how politicians are more likely to perpetuate conflict when they are sheltered from its costs. Most of his research employs natural experiments in order to identify causal relationships. He has Ph.D. in Economics from Trinity College, University of Dublin, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Laveesh Bhandari is a Senior Fellow at CSEP. Laveesh will lead and develop the climate change capability at CSEP. In addition, he will help define the broad macro agenda and advise on the sub-national reform. Dr Bhandari is an economist, entrepreneur and an environmentalist. He is currently the Director of Indicus Foundation and leads its Environment and Sustainable Livelihoods initiative. Laveesh has published widely on subjects related to sustainable livelihoods, industrial, economic and social reforms in India, economic geography and financial inclusion. He received his PhD in economics from Boston University for which he was awarded the Best thesis in International Economics. He has taught economics in Boston University and IIT Delhi. He has been the managing editor of Journal of Emerging Market Finance, and worked at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi. He has built, seeded, and exited from three companies in the research, analytics and digital domain.
Stephen Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. Professor Kaplan’s research and teaching interests focus on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the rise of China in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin American politics.
Professor Carol Wise, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California (USC), has written widely on trade integration, exchange rate crises, institutional reform, and the political economy of market restructuring in the Latin American region. Wise is author of the book, Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out) on China’s International Development Strategy (Yale University Press, 2020), which received USC’s Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award in 2021 and the Luciano Tomassini 2021 Award-Honorable Mention for the Best Book on International Relations from the Latin American Studies Association. Professor Wise’s most recent journal articles include: “Playing both Sides of the Pacific: Latin America’s Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with China,” Pacific Affairs (2016); “Conceptualizing China-Latin America Relations in the 21 st Century” (with Victoria Chonn Ching), The Pacific Review (2017); and, “International Trade Norms in the Age of Covid-19” (with Nicolas Albertoni), Fudan Humanities and Social Science Journal (2020). Professor Wise has held Fulbright Grants to Canada, Mexico, and Peru. She is a member of the core social science faculty at Renmin University’s annual International Summer Program, Beijing. In 2019, Wise was the Fulbright-Masaryk University Distinguished Chair in the Czech Republic. Her latest research compares the political economy of development in Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe.
Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she codirects the Certificate in Political Economy. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Global Scholar Award for research in India, Mexico, and Russia. Her next book, Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. She is the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell, 2011), and scholarly articles and book chapters. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and consulted for The Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Hsueh has served as a Global Order Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, member of the Georgetown Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, and Residential Research Faculty Fellow at U.C. Berkeley. She also lectured as a Visiting Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. She held the Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California and conducted international fieldwork in China, Japan, and Taiwan as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and David L. Boren National Security Fellow. She earned her B.A. and doctorate in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Danny Leipziger is Professor of International Business and International Affairs at George Washington University, where he is concurrently the Managing Director of the Growth Dialogue. Professor Leipziger has been a faculty member in the highly-ranked International Business Department since 2009, where he has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on macroeconomics, applied development, financial crises, and international economics, and he has taught in the GW/IFC/Milken Capital Markets Graduate Program for mid-career government officials since its inception. He has been advisor to the governments of South Korea, Vietnam, Ivory Coast, Uzbekistan, Argentina, and South Africa, among others.
Presenter: Ricardo Santos is a Research Fellow of the United Nations University World Institute of Development Economics Research – UNU-WIDER, stationed in Maputo, Mozambique, as Technical Advisor to the Centre of Economics and Management Studies at the Faculty of Economics of Eduardo Mondlane University. His doctoral research examined the post-conflict labour market and education sector in Timor-Leste, looking at the medium-run impact of exposure to violence and conflict produce on the households’ choices regarding education. His recent research has focused on the Mozambican labour market, school-to-work transition and on poverty and inequality. His previous work in the development field includes voluntary work for one year in Timor-Leste as a member of a Portuguese NGO and, Program Manager for Timor-Leste and Angola and Deputy Executive Officer of the same NGO.
Giovanni Peri is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is Editor of the “Journal of the European Economic Association” and in the Editorial Board of several Academic Journals in Economics. He is the Founder and Director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center an interdisciplinary research group focusing on international migrations.
Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University. She is a co-editor of American Economic Review: Insights. Pande’s research is largely focused on how formal and informal institutions shape power relationships and patterns of economic and political advantage in society, particularly in developing countries. She is interested in the role of public policy in providing the poor and disadvantaged political and economic power, and how notions of economic justice and human rights can help justify and enable such change. Her most recent work focuses on testing innovative ways to make the state more accountable to its citizens, such as strengthening women’s economic and political opportunities, ensuring that environmental regulations reduce harmful emissions, and providing citizens effective means to voice their demand for state services. In 2018, Pande received the Carolyn Bell Shaw Award from the American Economic Association for promoting the success of women in the economics profession. She is the co-chair of the Political Economy and Government Group at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Board member of Bureau of Research on Economic Development (BREAD) and a former co-editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics. Before coming to Yale, Pande was the Rafik Harriri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she co-founded Evidence for Policy Design. Pande received a Ph.D. in economics from London School of Economics, a BA/MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and a BA in Economics from Delhi University.
Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years. From January 2020 she will join the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 19 books (including “Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India”, Women Unlimited, New Delhi 2009; the co-edited “Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, 2014, “Demonetisation Decoded”, Routledge 2017 and “Women workers in the informal economy”, Routledge forthcoming) and nearly 200 scholarly articles. She has received several prizes, including for distinguished contributions to the social sciences in India in 2015; the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2010; the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010, Italy. She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She is the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates, an international network of heterodox development economists. She has consulted for international organisations including ILO, UNDP, UNCTAD, UN-DESA, UNRISD and UN Women and is member of several international commissions, including the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) and the Commission for Global Economic Transformation of INET. She writes regularly for popular media like newspapers, journals and blogs.
James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in Mexico. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu.
Ajay Chhibber is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Institute of International Economic Policy, George Washington University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council, Washington DC. He was earlier Director General, Independent Evaluation Office, Government of India and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), India. He held senior positions at the UN as Assistant Secretary General and Assistant Administrator, UNDP and managed their program for Asia and the Pacific. He also served in senior positions at the World Bank. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He taught at Georgetown University and at the University of Delhi.
Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught since 2017. Her research and teaching focus on slavery’s rise and fall in the American South and the wider Atlantic World, disease in the nineteenth century, the history of race and ethnicity, and the social upheaval of the Age of Revolutions. Last year, she was awarded Stanford’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for undergraduate teaching. Before moving to California, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London. Her book entitled Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom will be published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2021. Her article “Immunity, Power, and Belonging in Antebellum New Orleans,” was published by the American Historical Review last year.
Martin Saavedra is an Associate Professor of Economics at Oberlin College and earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. He primarily works in the fields of economic history, health economics, and labor economics, and his research focuses on the economics of infectious disease, infant health, and the WW2 internment of Japanese Americans. His work has been published in the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, the Journal of Economic Literature, among others.
Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD, PhD, is the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. Dean Matthew is a leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on racial disparities in health care. She joined the UVA Law faculty in 2017 and is the author of the book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care. At UVA, she served as Co-Founder and Inaugural Director of The Equity Center, a transdisciplinary research center that seeks to build better relationships between UVA and the Charlottesville community through community-engaged scholarship that tangibly redresses racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK, and former Professor and Director, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She has been President, International Society for Ecological Economics; Vice-President, International Economic Association; President, International Society for Feminist Economics; and held distinguished positions at the Universities of Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Minnesota, and the New York University School of Law. Dr. Agarwal’s publications include the multiple award-winning book, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Gender and Green Governance (OUP, 2010) and Gender Challenges (OUP, 2016), a three volume compendium of her selected papers on Agriculture, Property, and the Environment. Her pioneering work on gender inequality in property and land and on environmental governance, has had global impact. Her many awards include a Padma Shri, 2008; book prizes; the Leontief Prize 2010; Louis Malassis Scientific Prize 2017; and the International Balzan Prize, 2017.
Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Professor Lustig’s research focuses on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Her recent publication Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty is a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and President Emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Prof. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Guido Neidhöfer is an advanced researcher in the Labor Markets and Human Resources department at ZEW Mannheim, Germany, as well as a fellow at the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER), visiting scholar at the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS) of the National University of La Plata, and an associated researcher of the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Humano (CEDH) of the Universidad de San Andres in Argentina. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of economic inequality, social mobility, education and migration.
Stephen B. Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. Professor Kaplan’s research and teaching interests focus on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the rise of China in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin American politics.
Dr. Michael C. Wolfson received his B.Sc with honours from University of Toronto jointly in mathematics, computer science and economics in 1971, and then a Ph.D. from Cambridge in economics in 1977. He retired as Assistant Chief Statistician, Analysis and Development (which included the Health Statistics program and the central R&D function) at Statistics Canada in 2009. He was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Modeling in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa for 2010-2017. Prior to joining Statistics Canada, he held increasingly senior positions in the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Department of Finance, the Privy Council Office, the House of Commons, and the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office. While a senior public servant, he was also a founding Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program in Population Health (1988-2003). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a member of the recently created Canadian Statistics Advisory Council.
James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in Mexico. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu.
Viral V. Acharya is the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business (NYU-Stern) and an Academic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Philadelphia. Viral was a Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) during 23rd January 2017 to 23rd July 2019 in charge of Monetary Policy, Financial Markets, Financial Stability, and Research. His speeches while at the RBI will release in the end of July 2020 in the form of a book titled “Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India” (SAGE Publications India), with a new introductory chapter “Fiscal Dominance: A Theory of Everything in India”. Viral completed Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 1995 and Ph.D. in Finance from NYU-Stern in 2001. Prior to joining Stern, he was at London Business School (2001-2008), the Academic Director of the Coller Institute of Private Equity at LBS (2007-09) and a Senior Houblon-Normal Research Fellow at the Bank of England (Summer 2008). Viral’s primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk of the financial sector, its regulation and its genesis in government-induced distortions, an inquiry that cuts across several other strands of research – credit risk and liquidity risk, their interactions and agency-theoretic foundations, as well as their general equilibrium consequences. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Financial Analysts Journal. He is currently associate editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies (RCFS, 2011-) and Review of Finance (2006-), and was an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation (2009-12) and associate editor of the Journal of Finance (2011-14).
Liaquat Ahamed is the author of the critically acclaimed best-seller, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about central bankers during the Great Depression of 1929-1932. The book won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2010 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the 2009 Financial Times-Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award. Ahamed was a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently a director of the Putnam Funds. He is on the board of trustees of the Journal of Philosophy, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and a former trustee of the Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge.
Rakesh Mohan is one of India’s senior-most economic policymakers and an expert on central banking, monetary policy, infrastructure and urban affairs. Most recently he was executive director at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and chairman, National Transport Development Policy Committee, Government of India, in the rank of a Minister of State. He is also a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India. As deputy governor he was in charge of monetary policy, financial markets, economic research and statistics. In addition to serving in various posts for the Indian government, including representing India in a variety of international forums such as Basel and G20, Mohan has worked for the World Bank and headed prestigious research institutes. He is also Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute and Distinguished Fellow of Brookings India. Mohan has written extensively on urban economics, urban development, Indian economic policy reforms, monetary policy and central banking.
Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Dr Alkire works on a new approach to measuring poverty and well-being that goes beyond the traditional focus on income and growth. This multidimensional approach to measurement includes social goals, such as health, education, nutrition, standard of living and other valuable aspects of life. She devised a new method for measuring multidimensional poverty with her colleague James Foster (OPHI Research Associate and Professor of Economics at George Washington University) that has advantages over other poverty measures and has been adopted by the Mexican Government, the Bhutanese Government in their ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ and the United Nations Development Programme. Dr Alkire has been called upon to provide input and advice to several initiatives seeking to take a broader approach to well-being rather than just economic growth, for example, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (instigated by President Sarkozy); the United Nations Human Development Programme Human Development Report Office; the European Commission; and the UK’s Department for International Development.
Monica Pinilla-Roncancio is a Physiotherapist with a Master’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Rosario. She has also a Master’s degree in Health Economics, Policy and Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. She finished her PhD in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham, UK. From 2016 to 2018 she was as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad de los Andes and currently is an Assistant Professor at the same university. She is the Co-director of Metrics and Policy at OPHI and has been working in OPHI since 2014. She coordinates the work in Latin America, East Asia and some countries in Africa and Middle East. Her main research interest are disability, multidimensional poverty, inequality and health economics.
Frances Stewart was Director of ODID from 1993-2003 and Director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the department between 2003 and 2010. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex. Among many publications, she is coauthor of UNICEF’s influential study, Adjustment with a Human Face (OUP 1987); War and Underdevelopment (OUP 2001); and leading author and editor of Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies (Palgrave, 2008). She has directed a number of major research programmes including several financed by the UK Government’s Department for International Development, and others by the Swedish Development Agency and the Carnegie Corporation. An Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, Frances has acted as consultant for early Human Development Reports; she has been President of the Human Development and Capability Association; President of the British and Irish Development Studies Association; Chair of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy and Vice-Chair of the Board of the International Food Policy Research Institute. She received the Leontief prize in 2013 for advancing the frontiers of economic thought from Tufts University. She was given the UNDP’s Mahbub ul Haq award for her lifetime’s achievements in promoting human development in 2009; and named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders for 2003 by Scientific American (Policy Leader in Economic Development Strategies for promoting anti-poverty campaigns to help quell armed conflicts in developing countries).
Ricardo Nogales is a Research Officer at OPHI since May 2018. He holds a BSc. and a MSc. In Economics and a PhD in Econometrics, all from the University of Geneva (Switzerland). Before joining OPHI, he was a Professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance of the Universidad Privada Boliviana in Bolivia and a Research Assistant at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Switzerland. He carried on research activities in the field of development economics, poverty reduction and human development with the IDB, UNDP, ILO, World Bank, Oxfam and IDRC. He has been an external consultant for several public organizations in Bolivia, including the Program for Strategic Research, the Central Bank, the Institute for Agricultural Insurance and the Ministry of Economics and Public Finance.
Dean Jolliffe is a Lead Economist in the Development Data Group of the World Bank and member of the LSMS-ISA team. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of household surveys and is currently managing ongoing LSMS-ISA work in Ethiopia. He has also worked in the South Asia region at the Bank on poverty assessments for Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Previously, he was a Research Economist at the Economic Research Service of USDA, an Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, an Assistant Professor at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education in Prague, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Dean holds appointments as a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, and as a Research Affiliate with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
Deepa Ollapally is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, India-China relations, and Asian regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Sigur Center. She also directs the Rising Powers Initiative, a major research program that tracks and analyzes foreign policy debates in aspiring powers of Asia and Eurasia. Dr. Ollapally is currently working on a funded book, Big Power Competition for Influence in the Indian Ocean Region, which assesses the shifting patterns of geopolitical influence by major powers in the region since 2005 and the drivers of these changes. She is the author of five books including Worldviews of Aspiring Powers (Oxford, 2012) and The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge, 2008). Her most recent books are two edited volumes, Energy Security in Asia and Eurasia (Routledge, 2017), and Nuclear Debates in Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Dr. Ollapally has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, MacArthur Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asia Foundation for projects related to India and Asia. Previously, she was Associate Professor at Swarthmore College and has been a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London and at Columbia University. Dr. Ollapally also held senior positions in the policy world including the US Institute of Peace, Washington DC and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. She is a frequent commentator in the media, including appearances on CNN, BBC, CBS, Diane Rehm Show and Reuters TV. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Jennifer G. Cooke is director of the Institute for African Studies at The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. The Institute serves as central for research, scholarly discussion, and debate on issues relevant to Africa. She is a professor of practice in international affairs, teaching courses on U.S. Policy Toward Africa and Transnational Security Threats in Africa. Cooke joined George Washington University in August 2018, after 18 years as director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she led research and analysis on political, economic, and security dynamics in Africa. While at CSIS, Cooke directed projects on a wide range of African issues, including on violent extremist organizations in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, China’s growing role in Africa, democracy and elections in Nigeria, religion and state authority in Africa, “stress-testing” state stability in Africa, Africa’s changing energy landscape, and more. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on U.S.-Africa policy and has provided briefing, commentary, and testimony to the media, US Congress, AFRICOM leadership and the U.S. military. She has traveled widely in Africa and has been an election observer in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, and Nigeria. As a teenager, she lived in Cote d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic. She holds an M.A. in African studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in government, magna cum laude, from Harvard University.
Andrew Tiffin is a senior economist at the IMF, working in the regional studies division of the Fund’s African Department. He is also keenly involved in the effort to incorporate artificial intelligence/machine-learning techniques into the standard analytical toolkit of the Fund. Previously, he has worked on Middle Eastern countries, with a particular interest in refugee issues in Jordan and Lebanon, as well as numerous countries in Europe–he was part of the Italy team during the debt crisis of 2012, and part of the Russia team for the global financial crisis of 2008. Raised in Sydney, Andrew is an Australian national. He received his post-graduate training at Princeton University, where he obtained both a Ph.D. in economics and an M.P.A. in international relations. In addition to his work with the Fund, Andrew has held positions at the Reserve Bank of Australia, and with the Australian Government.
Louise Fox is an experienced development economist who specializes in strategies for employment creation, opportunity expansion, economic empowerment, and poverty reduction. She has advised governments in the developed and developing world, international organizations, and philanthropic and non-profit organizations on problem diagnosis, strategies for results, and outcome measurement. She held full-time positions at USAID (as Chief Economist) and at the World Bank. She is currently affiliated with the African Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the Blum Center for Developing Economies, University of California, Berkeley. She was previously affiliated with the Overseas Development Institute, where she led a major research project. Louise has published in the areas of inclusive growth, structural transformation, youth employment, the political economy of poverty reduction, gender and women’s economic empowerment, employment, labor markets, and labor regulation, pension reform, reform of child welfare systems, social protection, effective public expenditures in the social sectors, and female-headed households and child welfare. Her most recent book was Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, published by the World Bank in 2014.
Seung Mo Choi is a Senior Economist working on regional surveillance in the IMF’s African Department. He has worked on banking crises, financial market policies, climate change, low-income country issues, and capacity development, including in the IMF’s European Department and in the Institute for Capacity Development. His research has been published in economics and finance journals such as International Economic Review. Prior to joining the IMF, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Washington State University and obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in economics from Seoul National University.
Stephen C. Smith is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. In 2018 he was UNICEF Senior Fellow at the UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, Florence, Italy. Smith received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University and has been a Fulbright Research Scholar, a Jean Monnet Research Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, a Fulbright Senior Specialist, a member of the Advisory Council of BRAC USA, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He has twice served as Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at GWU. Smith is the co-author with Michael Todaro of Economic Development (12th Edition, Pearson, 2014). He is also author of Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works (paperback edition Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and co-editor with Jennifer Brinkerhoff and Hildy Teegen of NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is also author or coauthor of about 45 professional journal articles and many other publications. Smith’s recent research has focused on extreme poverty and strategies and programs to address it; and on the economics of adaptation and resilience to climate change in low-income countries, emphasizing autonomous adaptation by households and communities and its effects, and adaptation financing.
Preya Sharma is a senior economist in the African Department of the IMF where she is Special Assistant to the Director. Her research has focused on structural transformation, the future of work, and digitalization in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as emerging market crises and development. Before joining the IMF she was the Head of Emerging Markets at HM Treasury in the UK. She holds a Masters in Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics.
