Washington, DC, February 15, 2008

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  Speakers

Hans Timmer is Manager of the Global Trends Team in the Development Prospects Group. He is also responsible for short-term monitoring, medium-term forecasting and policy analysis and long-term scenario analysis of the global economy. Previously, he was head of international economic analysis at the Netherlands’ Central Planning Bureau (CPB). He has had vast experience working with the European Commission, IPCC and the OECD, as well as with the Indian Planning Commission and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and has participated in international modeling groups such as LINK and GTAP.

 Fabrizio Coricelli is Director of Policy Studies at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). He has also served as Full Professor of Economics at the University of Siena and Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, London, and the William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan. Previously, he was Professor of Macroeconomics at the Central European University, Budapest and Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He was an economic adviser to the European Commission from 2001 to 2002. He has published numerous papers on exchange rate policy, fiscal policy, and the economics of transition. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

 Sena Eken is Assistant Director in the International Monetary Fund's Middle East and Central Asia Department. She was a Principal Contributor to the most recent IMF Middle East and Central Asia Regional Outlook. She has also been leading the work on the Central Asian Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) program. She has published widely on exchange rate policies, trade, postwar reconstruction, fiscal policy, and growth.

Gareth Shepherd is a financial risk specialist. He is currently Head of the Economic and Financial Risk Unit at the World Economic Forum, where he is also a Global Leadership Fellow. He is one of the principal authors of the 2008 Global Risk Report.

 Discussants

 Thomas Laursen is Lead Economist in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank.

 Lalit Raina is Sector Manager of the Finance Sector Department of the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region.

 Panel 2 (Transmission Channels I) What are the poverty and distributional consequences of a credit crunch?

 Speakers

 Yasuyuki Sawada is Professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Economics. His research interests include econometric investigations of household and firm behavior using micro-data from different countries such as Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Indonesia, Kenya, El Salvador, Korea, and Japan. He has written numerous academic papers, including some recent papers on the credit crunch in Japan and Korea. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

 Dawid Żochowski is a Financial Stability Expert at the European Central Bank. He is on leave from the National Bank of Poland, where he is a Principal Economist, and on leave from the Warsaw School of Economics, where he is an Associate Professor. He has been conducting some pioneering work analyzing the distribution of household indebtedness in Poland and its implications for financial stability. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Warsaw School of Economics.

 Ksenia Yudaeva is Director of the Center for Strategic Research in Moscow. She serves as consultant to the Ministry of Economy and Trade. Previously she served as Director for Policy Studies of the Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) in Moscow, and was a Scholar in Residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. She has taught at the New Economic School. She holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 Santiago Herrera is Lead Economist at the World Bank’s DEC Policy Review Unit (DECPR). He previously served as Deputy Minister of Finance and Director of the National Budget Office in Colombia. He has published widely on macroeconomic issues facing countries in Latin America.

 Discussants

 John Litwack is Lead Economist in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank.

 Martin Raiser is Adviser in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank.

 Speakers

 Miroslav Beblavý is currently Executive Director of the Slovak Governance Institute. Between 2002 and 2006, he served as State Secretary of the Slovak Republic’s Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Family. He is author of numerous papers and books, including a 2007 Routledge volume on Monetary Policy in Central Europe. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of St Andrews.

 Paul Dorosh is a Senior Economist with the Spatial and Local Development Team in the World Bank’s Finance Economics and Urban Department. He has written numerous papers on food security and poverty. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked for six years as a senior research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute, including four years in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he served as advisor to the Ministry of Food. From 1989 to 1997, he was a senior research associate and Associate Professor with Cornell University where he worked on the effects of structural adjustment policies and poverty in countries of sub-Saharan Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Stanford University.

 Kathleen Beegle is Senior Economist in the Development Economics Research Group at the World Bank. As member of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study team, she has expertise in the design and implementation of household survey operations and use of household surveys for poverty and policy analysis.  She has published widely, including on the poverty and social consequences of the Indonesian financial crisis. Prior to joining the World Bank, she was an economist at RAND.  She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University.

 Gabriela Inchauste is a Senior Economist with the IMF Institute (currently on leave). Prior to joining the Institute, she served as an economist in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the IMF. She is co-editor of a recent volume on fiscal policy in low income countries. She has published empirical papers on the impact of macroeconomic crises in Latin American countries. More recently, she has published articles on the impact of regulatory and legal constraints on the informal sector and on business growth in developing countries. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Texas.

 Discussants

 Julian Lampietti is Lead Specialist in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank.

 William Sutton is Senior Agriculture Economist in the Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank.

 Speakers

 Kalanidhi Subbarao is currently working as a consultant on social protection issues in the South Asia Region of the World Bank. Previously, he was a Lead Economist and worked extensively on poverty analysis, particularly in the domain of safety nets, and participated in numerous operations bearing on social protection including in East Asian countries following the financial crisis of 1997. He is the main author of Safety Net Programs and Poverty Reduction: Lessons from Cross-Country Experience.

 Charles M. Becker is Research Professor in Duke University's Department of Economics. He previously taught at Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Colorado at Denver. Professor Becker served as Team Leader for the Asian Development Bank's pension reform project in the Kyrgyz Republic. Professor Becker has also been an advisor to the Kazakhstan government on its pension reform program. He has written numerous papers on the economics of transition economies, including on the migration response to economic shocks. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University.

 Emil Tesliuc is Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Human Development Network. He has extensive operational, research and policy experience in the areas of safety nets and social risk management. He has written a number of papers on poverty, vulnerability, and social protection. He is currently leading a comparative study of social protection in transition economies. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, and a master in public policy from Princeton University.

 Nora Dudwick is Senior Social Scientist in the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Group. She has carried out qualitative research studies of transition and poverty in many countries of the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, in addition to investigating the social impacts of transition on rural life, education, and social structure. Major publications include the co-edited volumes, When Things Fall Apart: Qualitative Studies of Poverty in the Former Soviet Union. (2003) and Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist States (2000). She also served as a member of the core team that produced two flagship reports on poverty, inequality, and growth in Europe and Central Asia. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.

 Discussants