Participants

Angelescu, Ramona

Balazs, Peter Before beginning his long diplomatic career, Péter Balázs studied economics at the Budapest School of Economics, graduating in 1963. After working in several Hungarian ministries, he served as Hungarian Ambassador to Germany, Denmark and the EU. He established the Permanent Representation of Hungary to the European Union. He was the Representative of the Hungarian Government at the European Convention. Upon Hungary’s accession to the EU, Péter Balázs was the first Hungarian member of the European Commission. Balázs is a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2003. Currently he is Professor at Corvinus University and at Central European University, as well as director of its Center for the Study of the Extension of European Integration. He is a founding member of the European Movement in Hungary and of the Hungarian Foreign Affairs Society.

Baniak, Andrzej is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the Central European University, Budapest. He started his career in Poland, where he was lecturer at the Wroclaw University of Economics.  Then he got his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in 1996.  Afterwards he was   working for two years as a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Liverpool, UK. In Fall 2000 he was a Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. His research and publications focus on industrial economics, economics of regulation, transition economics.

Berglöf, Erik is Director the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) at the Stockholm School. He is a Research Fellow of CEPR and the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan. He was previously assistant professor at ECARE, Université Libre de Bruxelles and has held visiting positions at Stanford University. He has written extensively on financial contracting and corporate governance. In particular, he has applied theoretical insights to the study of differences between financial systems, and specific ownership and control arrangements. More recently, his work has focused on bankruptcy.     He has also been involved in several capacity-building initiatives in transition countries, including as Director of the Center for Economics and Financial Research (CEFIR) in Moscow and the Baltic International Center for Economic Policy Studies (BICEPS) in Riga. He has served as special advisor to the Prime Minister of Sweden and on several government commissions and EU-related panels. In addition, he has been a consultant to the World Bank and the IMF.

Bhargava, Vinay

Bonin, John P. is the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science at Wesleyan University in Connecticut USA. He is a research fellow of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan Business School and a Visiting Professor in the Scholl of Business at the University of Reading (UK).    Recently, he was an invited Visiting Professor at the Université de Paris1 (Sorbonne).  Bonin has been the Editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics since 1996. He served on the board of directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research for four years. Bonin has published more than sixty articles in economics journals and edited volumes; he is a collaborating author of three books and the co-translator from French of four microeconomic theory books.  He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the U.S. Treasury, the Institute for EastWest Studies, and the Institute for International Economics (WIIW) in Vienna. He has also been an expert witness in an international banking case and his recent publications focus on banking and finance in transition countries, including China.    Empirical work on the impact of bank privatization in transition economies has been published in the Journal of Banking and Finance, Economic Systems and in Systemic Financial Crises: Resolving Large Bank Insolvencies edited by Douglas Evanoff and George Kaufman.  An invited policy paper drawing lessons from Poland’s experiences with state-owned enterprises is being published in Chinese by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Bourguignon, François is Chief Economist and Senior Vice President Development Economics. He is internationally recognized as an intellectual leader in the economics of public policy, inequality and economic growth and development. He also has considerable practical experience of the World Bank and its interactions with developing countries and other partners. He became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President, Development Economics, on October 6, 2003. Bourguignon was previously Director of the Development Research Group, a part of the Development Economics Vice Presidency, and managing editor of the World Bank Economic Review. He has served as an advisor to many developing countries, the OECD, the United Nations, and the European Commission. Since 1985 he has been Professor of Economics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he founded and directed the DELTA research unit in theoretical and applied economics. He has held academic positions with the University of Chile, Santiago, and the University of Toronto. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society. A French national, Bourguignon has authored and edited several books as well as numerous articles in leading international journals in economics.

Cárdenas, Mauricio is currently Executive Director of Fedesarrollo, an independent policy-oriented research center in Bogotá, Colombia. He has published seven books and a large number of academic papers. Since 1992 he has taught in the Economics graduate program at Universidad de los Andes. In 2001 he was Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. In 1999 he was selected by CNN/Time Magazine as one the Leaders of the New Millennium. Between 2001 and 2003 he was President of Titularizadora Colombiana, an IFC-sponsored initiative that developed Colombia’s secondary mortgage market. Prior to that, he was Minister of Transportation (1998-1999) and Director of National Planning (1999-2000). He also served as Minister of Economic Development in 1994 and as General Manager of the Empresa de Energía de Bogotá in 1993. Mr. Cardenas holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Campbell, Robert is a Distinguished Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Indiana University. His specialty is analysis of the former centrally planned economies and the problems of transforming them into market economies. In recent years he  has  combined  research  and  publication on problems of the transition with advising  and  consulting  on  economic  transition. A major part of this work has been in organizing, directing, evaluating programs to modernize economics education in countries of the former Soviet Union. Mr. Campbell is fluent in Russian.

Coupe, Tom received his Ph.D. from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 2002. He is assistant professor at EERC, Kyiv where he teaches labor economics and econometrics. He does research on personnel economics, with a focus on performance evaluation and the labor market of economists. Other research interests are political economy and the economics of science.



Csaba, Laszlo Born in 1954 in Budapest. From 1976-87 associated with Institute for World Economy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1988-2000 Kopint-Datorg Economic Research, since  July 2000 full time faculty/professor of International Political Economy at CEU IRES. Previously, 1991-97 professor of International Economics, College of Foreign Trade, Budapest. Since July 1997 part time professor of Comparative Economics at Corvinus University, Budapest. Since 1999 part time professor of International Economics and founder of the doctoral program “Globalization, Competitiveness and Regionalization" at the University of Debrecen. Since 2oo4 founding member of the CEU doctoral school of economics and since 2oo2 director of the Ph.D program of IRES. His visiting professorship include the private Universitá Bocconi/Milan/Italy/1991/, Department of Economics, University of Helsinki/Finland/1993/, Europa Universitaet Viadrina-Frankfurt-O/Germany/1997/, and the Freie Universitaet Berlin/Germany/1998-2000, five semesters in a row. Author and editor of 6 volumes and over 190 academic articles and chapters in books published in 18 countries/cf website of the HAS for details/, including the monographs Eastern Europe in the World Economy/Cambridge University Press, 1990/, The Capitalist Revolution in Eastern Europe/Edward Elgar, 1995/ and The New Political Economy of Emerging Europe/Akadémiai/Kluwer, 2oo4. On the editorial board of the following academic journals: Europe-Asia Studies/Glasgow, Intereconomics/Hamburg, Voprosy Ekonomiki/Moscow, Journal of Comparative Economic Studies/Kyoto, Acta oeconomica, Közgazdasági szemle/Chair of the editorial board/, Külgazdaság, Competitio/all in Hungary/. Since 1986 member of the Committee on Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, for 1996-2oo2 Co-Chair, since November 2002 as Chair. Also Co-Chair of the Doctoral/Qualifying Committe on Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and member of the International Studies and development Economics Committees. Founding member of the European Association for Comparative Economic Studies, for 199o-94 and 1996-98 Vice President, for 1999-2ooo President of EACES. Founding member of the Hungarian Foreign Policy Association and the Alexander von Humboldt Association Hungary.  Courses taught: The New Political Economy of Emerging Europe, The Political Economy of the European Union and The New Political Economy of Development,Ph.D course/CEU/, Comparative Economics/Corvinus and Debrecen Universities/, The Economics of Emerging Markets/Corvinus/, The Economics of Globalization/University of Debrecen, Ph.D course/.   Regular contributor to the weekly Figyel*/jointly published with Business Week, as well as to the electronic media. Married to Gabriella Ónody/since 198o/, a literary critic, father of two-Zoltán, b.1985, student of sociology at Corvinus University and Orsolya,b1988, studying at the Budapest Lutheran Secondary School-Fasor.

Dabrowski, Marek is one of the CASE founders, the Chairman of the CASE Foundation Council, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the CASE Ukraine in Kiev and the member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for the Economy in Transition in Moscow. He graduated in 1974 from the Warsaw University (MA in Economics). He received his PhD in Economics in the Institute of Planning (1979) and “habilitation” degree at the Lodz University (1987). He received the title of Professor in 1995. Since 1978 Marek Dabrowski has been actively participating in discussion on economic reforms in Poland. Since September 1989 to September 1990 he was the First Deputy Finance Minister. Later on he was a MP (1991-1993), the Chairman of the governmental advisory Council of Ownership Changes (1991-1996) and a member of the Monetary Policy Council of the National bank of Poland (1998-2004). He worked as a consultant to the World Bank and UNDP and has been involved in policy advice, policy research and training in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan and in a number of international research projects related to monetary and fiscal policies, currency crises, EU and EMU enlargement, and the political economy of transition. He is an author and co-author of numerous publications including several books. Fluent in English and Russian.

Earle, John S. studied economics and music at Oberlin College and Conservatory, the Musikhochschule in Vienna, and Stanford University, where he received the PhD in Economics.    Subsequently he taught economics at Stanford from 1990 to 2000 and at the Central European University since it opened in 1991.    Currently he is Senior Economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Professor of Economics and Director of the Labor Project at CEU.  His research focuses on the microeconomic behavior of firms and workers under conditions of structural and institutional change, and he has written widely on unemployment, labor reallocation, enterprise performance, and corporate governance.

Elkana, Yehuda was born in Yugoslavia in 1934, and after the war and a year in a concentration camp he immigrated to Israel in 1948. He studied physics, mathematics and history of science, also taking courses in biology, and received an MSc degree. In 1968, he completed his doctoral studies with a thesis "On the Emergence of the Energy Concept," published later by Harvard University Press. For one year, he taught at Harvard University. From 1968 he taught in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University and served as its Chairman. He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1973-74) a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1977-78); from 1981 until 1991 he was Director of the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. From 1968 to 1993 he was Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In 1988-89 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and since 1987 a Permanent Fellow there. He is a Member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Collegium Budapest, and its Deputy Chairman; Yehuda Elkana is a corresponding member of the International Academy for the History of Science. He is co-founder and editor of Science in Context and author of several books and numerous articles. From 1995 to 1999 he was full Professor for the Philosophy of Science at the ETH Zurich. In April 1997 he became a Member of the Scientific Board of the Collegium Helveticum. In 2001 he was elected to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for a period of four years, i.e. till 2004. Since 1999 Yehuda Elkana is the President and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest. He is married to Dr. Yehudit Elkana and has four children.

Ferro, Manuela is the Lead Country Economist for Pakistan, leading the World Bank's economic work for that country.  She joined the World Bank in 1994, and has since worked on India, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Angola, Mexico and Honduras.  Prior to joining the Bank she worked for the Government of Portugal on European Union accession issues, and was an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she taught macro and microeconomics.  Ms. Ferro's areas of interest are investment under uncertainty, financial markets, labor economics, and macroeconomic policy in developing economies.  She has published in the European Economic Review, Cornell University Press and MIT Press.  Ms. Ferro holds a Ph.D. and a Masters in Economics from Stanford University.

Fine, Jeffrey C.’s involvement in strengthening capacities for research and education began as a Senior Program Officer in the Economic Policy Program of the International Development Research Centre of Canada.    From 1979 to 1988, he was actively engaged in developing networks of researchers and institutions in East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.    He played a major role in designing the African Economic Research Consortium, an outgrowth of the IDRC’s Macroeconomic Policy Network for Eastern and Southern Africa, and served as its first Executive Director from 1988 to 1994.    Subsequently, as an independent consultant based in Ottawa, he has advised on capacity building initiatives in economics and other fields, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa.    Most recently, he served as technical adviser in the design and implementation of a Collaborative MSc. Programme for Agricultural and Applied Economics, encompassing 16 universities in 12 countries within Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

Gelb Alan, World Bank Director, Development Policy, Development Economics Vice President's Office, The World Bank. Before assuming his current position in July 2004, Alan Gelb was the Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa. Before that, he was staff director of the 1996 World Development Report, From Plan to Market, and chief of the transition division in the Bank’s policy research department. He is a specialist on transition economies, financial systems, macroeconomic management, commodity prices and the economics and political economy of oil-exporting countries.  He has published several books and scholarly articles on these and related subjects, and co-authored Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?, an authoritative study on African development.

Guriev, Sergei is a Human Capital Foundation Associate Professor of Corporate Finance and the Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow. He received his Dr.Sc. (habilitation degree) in Economics (2002) and PhD in Applied Math from the Russian Academy of Science (1994), and M.Sc. Summa Cum Laude from Moscow Institute of Physics in Technology (1993).    In 1997-98, Mr. Guriev visited the Department of Economics at M.I.T. for a one-year post-doctoral placement, and in 2003-2004, the Department of Economics at Princeton University as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Since 1999, Mr. Guriev has been a Research Affiliate at Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.  His research interests include contract theory, corporate governance, and labor mobility. He teaches graduate courses in microeconomic theory, contract theory, and development economics. Dr. Guriev has published in international refereed journals including American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Perspectives. Since 2003, Sergei Guriev has also been a columnist for the leading Russian business daily Vedomosti and has also contributed occasional columns to the New York Times, Moscow Times, and Expert.

Hewer, Ulrich has been working over the past decade and a half in the World Bank as an economist and private and financial sector specialist on transition countries in Central and South Eastern Europe and Russia. During 2001 - 2003 he served as Executive Director of the Economics Education and Research Consortium (EERC) where he helped consolidate and indigenize the teaching and research programs in Kiev and Moscow. Currently he works in the office of the Vice Preisdent for Europe and Central Asia (ECA) where he is taking the lead in creating local capacities for teaching graduate economics and conducting research in two new "regional centers of excellence" in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Hurwitz, Ellen

Kharas, Homi is the Chief Economist of the East Asia and Pacific Region (EAP) of the World Bank and Director of the region's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Department (PREM). In this capacity, he is responsible for the World Bank's policy advice, and lending in support of that advice, to countries in the region on matters of poverty reduction strategies, trade and competitiveness, public sector debt and fiscal policy, public expenditure management, governance, anti-corruption, financial and private sector development.

Kochendorfer-Lucius, Gudrun is Managing Director of InWent – Internationale Weiterbildung und Entwicklung (Capacity Building International). She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Heidelberg. Prior to her appointment as Managing Director of InWEnt, she was Director and Chairperson of the Devlopment Policy Forum at the German foundation for International Development, occupied various positions in the German Agency for Technical Corporation, and served in the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. She has also been a research fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development and a World Bank Visiting Scholar at DEC/VP. Ms Kochendorfer-Lucius is member of the Board of Trustees of Women’s World Banking (WWB) and a member of the EERC Steering Committee (Soros Foundation, World Bank, Eurasia Foundation). She ahs published numerous articles, papers and books.

Kornai, Janos is Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and Permanent Fellow Emeritus at Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study.Professor Kornai was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1928. He studied history and philosophy at Budapest University. His first encounter with economics was his appointment as economics editor of a daily newspaper with the largest circulation in Hungary, which required that he observe the socialist economy from within. In 1955, he entered the newly founded Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in the following year his book, Overcentralization of Economic Administration, was published. His was the first critical book on the command economy written by an “insider,” that is, by a citizen of a communist state. The book was his Ph.D. thesis. In the late 1950s, he was among those initiating the use of mathematical methods in socialist planning. He elaborated the theory of two-level planning with Tamás Lipták and directed the first large-scale, economy-wide, multi-level planning project. Experiencing the limits of planning led him to an increasing interest in theoretical foundations. Anti-Equilibrium (1971), a controversial essay criticizing Walrasian eoclassical economics, suggested new approaches to studying chronic non-Walrasian states, price- and non-price signals. In his personal intellectual development, this book was a preparation for the task that followed: enquiry into the nature of socialist systems. Issues like chronic shortage, forced growth, the soft budget constraint syndrome, ureaucratization, and conflicts between socialist principles and efficiency became his main concern. His findings were summarized first in Economics of Shortage (1980), and later in The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism (1992), which presents a synthetic analysis of the political, social and economic attributes of the system. After the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe part of his attention turned to economic policy. The Road to a Free Economy (1989), which was published in 17 languages, was the first book to draw up the main tasks of post-socialist transition. It proposed radical, rapid stabilization, with gradual privatization. Many of his subsequent writings dealt with macroeconomics and the interaction between politics and economic policy in the period of post-socialist transition. These writings were published in two volumes, Highway and Byways (1995) and Struggle and Hope (1997). He also produced several studies on the reform of the welfare system, and summarized these views in the book Welfare, Choice, and Solidarity in Transition (co-author Karen Eggleston, 2001).János Kornai served as President of the Econometric Society and also of the European Economic Association. He is Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of five other Academies. At present he is the President of the International Economic Association. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from a number of leading universities. He has received the highest Hungarian prizes for scholarship, as well as the Seidman Award (USA), and the Humboldt Prize (Germany). He has also become Officer of the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (France).

Lee, Jong-Wha is a professor of Economics and director of International Center for Korean Studies at Korea University. He is also an adjunct professor at Australian National University, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Economics Division. Jong-Wha received his B.A. in economics from Korea University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He has worked as Economist at the International Monetary Fund and taught at Harvard University as Visiting Professor. He has been a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the International Monetary Fund , the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank, and has held research positions at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, Central Bank of Chile, the Hoover Institution, Kobe University, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Korea Institute of Finance. 

Lewis, Kent has worked in higher education in the former Soviet Union for the past 13 years. From 1992 to 1995, he was the Kyiv-based regional director of American Councils for International Education (ACIE), covering Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova.  From 1995 to 1997, he managed the Edmund S. Muskie and Freedom Support Act Graduate Fellowship Programs in Washington for ACIE.  From 1997 to 1999, employed by the Eurasia Foundation, he helped launch and manage the Economics Education and Research Consortium (EERC) Master's Program in Economics at the National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy."  Afterwards, he joined the EERC management team in Washington.  The World Bank recently recruited him to help launch similar programs in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.  He holds bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kansas.

Lin, Justin Yifu is Professor and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University and Professor of Economics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1986 and is the author of thirteen books, including the China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform, which has been published in seven languages, and the State-owned Enterprise Reform, which is available in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He has published more than 100 articles in refereed international journals and collected volumes on history, development, and transition. Among many of his public roles in China, Justin Yifu Lin is an advisor to the State Leading Group of IT Development, a senior advisor to the Drafting Committee of China’s Tenth Five-year Plan, an advisor to the mayors of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, a member of the National Committee, and the vice Chairman of Committee for Economic Affairs, China People’s Political Consultation Conference. He also serves on several international committees, leading groups, and councils on development policy, technology, and environment.  He was awarded the 1993 and 2001 Sun Yefang Prize (the highest honour for economist in China), the 1993 Policy Article Prize of Centre for International Food and Agricultural Policy at University of Minnesota, the 1997 Sir John Crawford Award of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, the 1999 Best Article Prize of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Citation Classic Award in 2000 (by the publisher of Social Science Citation Index), and various other prizes.

Livny, Eric is a CIS Research Network Director of the Economics Education and Research Consortium (EERC).    He is also a Project Director for the "Bridging Research and Policy" project of the Global Development Network (GDN) which aims to study research-policy linkages and to promote evidence-based policymaking in low and middle income countries. His current research focuses on the quality of higher education in transition and the institutional development of the nascent think-tank industry in CEE and CIS. Livny is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has been working in Russia since 1993.

Lyakurwa, William is the Executive Director of the African Economic Research Consortium. He joined AERC from the International Trade Centre based in Geneva, Switzerland in 1993, where he held the post of Senior Trade Promotion Advisor. Mr. Lyakurwa has since 1994, held the positions of Director of Training and Deputy Executive Director until his appointment to the position of Executive Director in March 2003. As Director of Training, he is credited with the successful initiation of the ongoing Collaborative Masters Programme (CMAP) and the Collaborative PhD Programme (CPP) in response to a retroactive decline in external support and opportunities for graduate training in Economics in Africa.    William received his PhD from Cornell University, USA in 1978 as the culmination of notable academic performance in Economics at undergraduate and postgraduate level, from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to Cornell University, USA.    He has consequently been enlisted as an advisor and consultant to governments; regional bodies; multilateral institutions; international and non-governmental organizations.  He has served as Chair and member of several policy-making Boards in Tanzania and internationally.    He was the Chair of the PTA/IDRC Project Management Committee (1993 to 1997); of the NORDIC/SADCC Trade Advisory Group (1989 to 1994); and is currently the Chair of the COMESA Project Management Committee (2000 to the present).  William was also a Member of the steering committees of the OAU Policy Analysis Support Unit based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; the Secretariat for Institutional Support for Economic Research in Africa (SISERA) based in Dakar, Senegal; and the Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy in Africa (CEEPA) based in Pretoria, South Africa.  He has also served as Chair and Head of several national committees on trade and capacity building. Mr. Lyakurwa has published extensively in local and international journals as well as contributed chapters in books, research and discussion papers.He has a wealth of experience in research; graduate training; ‘hands-on’ human resource management; and a keen sense of appreciation of the challenges of implementing the Consortium’s programmes in an evolving continent.

Masiuk, Andrew is leading the ‘Indigenization of the Masters Program in Economics’ process in Kyiv. The process was initiated in March of 2003 and envisions the creation of the Kyiv School of Economics at the National University “Kyiv Mohyla Academy” as the university structure that will host the MA program and the Research and Outreach Center. The new structure should be in place by the end of 2005. In the 1990s, Mr. Masiuk helped to organize an MBA program at the International Management Institute in Kyiv, and was the Institute’s Director General 1992-1997. Graduate education in management and in economics and its relationship to the needs of the market has been a focus of Mr. Masiuk’s work in Ukraine for the past fifteen years.

Miller, Jeffrey is Professor of Economics at the University of Delaware and    editor of Comparative Economic Studies.    In the early 1990s he was director of the economics section of a USAID project to provide economics and management training in Bulgaria. The program established a quasi-masters of economics program in Bulgaria. Many of its participants later received advanced degrees through the University of Delaware. Since then he has done extensive research on the Bulgaria economy. He has also taught courses in several other countries including an economics course in a new MBA program in Sarajevo (Fall 2004) that is being organized by the University of Delaware through a grant from USAID. He presently has a Fulbright grant to teach at Sabanci University in Istanbul.

Newton-Smith, William is Member of the Open Society Institute Board of Trustees and serves as Chair of the OSI's Higher Education Sub-Board. He is also Fairfax Fellow in Philosophy at Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK.

Ofer, Gur is Harvey M. and Lyn P. Meyerhoff Emeritus Professor of Soviet Economics, at the Departments of Economics and of Russian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. ( www.economics.huji.ac.il ) He was one of the founders of the New Economic School (NES) in Moscow, a graduate school of economics in the Western transition, established in 1992 ( www.NES.ru ).For many years he served as its chair of the International Advisory Board. In 2004 he stepped down and remained a member of this board.    Gur Ofer wrote his Ph. D. dissertation at Harvard under Simon Kuznets and Abram Bergson, and worked extensively on the Soviet economy and the socialist system, and more recently on issues of transition its relations to economic development. Among his many publications are: The Service Sector in Soviet Economic Growth: A Comparative Study. Harvard UP, 1973; The Soviet Household Under the Old Regime: Economic Conditions and Behavior in the 1970s. (With Aaron Vinokur). Cambridge University Press 1992, a study based on in depth interviews of Russian immigrants; "Soviet Economic Growth: 1928‑1985: A Survey Article." JEL, December 1987; Reforming Planned Economies in an Integrating World Economy. (With Barry Bosworth), The Brookings Institution, 1995. “Development and Transition: Emerging but Merging?” Revue D’economie Financiere, (Special Issue), 2001. The Economic Prospects of the CIS: Sources of Long Term Growth since 1991 (Co-Editor with Richard Pomfret) Elgar Books, (2004). Over the years he served as a visiting scholar, among others, in Harvard, Columbia, Yale, The Rand Corporation, the Wilson Center, the Brooking Institution, the World Bank and NES. In Irsrael Gur Ofer worked on issues of the Welfare State and of Health Economics and is head of The Israel National Institute for Health Policy and Health Services Research ( www.israelhpr.org.il ). He served as a department chair and president of the Israeli Economic Association. Gur Ofer was born (1934) and educated in Jerusalem. He is married to Dalia, a Professor of History at the Hebrew University; they have four daughters and 5 grandchildren.

Pagano, Ugo is Professor of Economic Policy, Director of the PhD programme in Economics at the University of Siena and Recurrent Visiting Professor at CEU, Budapest where he has been Head of Department from 2003 to 2004.    He has been Rector’Delegate for Doctorate Studies at University of Siena since 1995. He was a member of the Senate of the University of Siena and Director of the Department    of Economics. He got his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1983 where he was University Lecturer and a Fellow of Pembroke College from 1985 to 1990. He has been the President of the Italian Association for the Study of Comparative Economic System    (AISSEC) and a member of the council of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy  (EAEPE) which in 1997 had also awarded him the Kapp Prize. He is the author of Work and Welfare in Economic Theory. (Blackwell 1985) and the co-editor of the books Democracy and Efficiency in the Economic Enterprise (Routledge, 1995)  of the Politics and the Economisc of Power  (Routledge, 1999) and the Evolution  of Economic Diversity.  His recent articles include “Nationalism, Development and Integration: the Political Economy of Ernest Gellner” Cambridge Journal of Economics (2003), “Cultural Standardization and Social Protection as Alternative Insurance Devices” (with M. D’Antoni), Structural Change and Economic Dynamics (2002), “Public Markets, Private orderings and Corporate Governance” International Review of Law and Economics (2000),”Incomplete Contracts, Intellectual Property and Institutional Complementarities” (with M. A. Rossi) European Journal of Law and Economics (2004). He has been the Director of the project of relevant national interest (PRNI) on the “Governance of Intellectual Property” and has directed the PRNI project on “Incomplete Contracts and Institutional Analysis”. A member of the Santa Fe Institute Founding Group on “new directions in behavioural sciences, his research interests include also the role of rationality and emotions in decision making and the analysis of evolutionary theories in social and in natural history.

Pleskovic, Boris is Research Manager, Development Economics at the World Bank. He previously served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister of Slovenia,1991-1992 and taught economics at MIT and the Universities of Illinois and Cincinnati. He also serves as a board member of the World Bank Economic Review, Transition Newsletter and International Regional Science Review; Guest Editor for Special Issues on Is Geography Destiny? and Regional Science and Development; and co-editor of ten books: Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (A copublication of the World Bank and Oxford University Press) with Michael Bruno, Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nicholas Stern and François Bourguignon; co-editor of seven books: the Berlin Workshop Series, including Institutional Foundations of a Market Economy (with Gudrun Kochendoerfer-Lucius); published widely, including "Political Independence and Economic Reform in Slovenia," (with Jeffrey Sachs) in The Transition in Eastern Europe, Chicago University Press and "Inter industry Flows in a General Equilibrium Model of Fiscal Incidence," Journal of Policy Modeling: Special Issue in Honor of Nobel Laureate, Wassily Leontief. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at MIT and a Fullbright Fellow at Harvard University; decorated by Charles University on the occasion of its 650th anniversary, Prague, 1998. He also serves as the President of the Slovenian World Congress, 2000 to present. He has BA from the University of Ljubljana, MA from Harvard University and Ph.D. from MIT.

Rostowski, Jacek (born 1951) Rostowski    Jacek  (born  1951).   He received  his  B.Sc.  in  1972  at  the London University College (international relations);    MA  in  economics and history in 1973 at the University of London and M.Sc.    in economics  in  1975  at  the  London School of Economics. Since 1995  he  has  been  Professor  of Economics at the Central European  University    in Budapest where he presently holds the position of Head of the Department    of Economics.  Between 1989 and  1991 and 1998 and 2002  he  was  macroeconomic policy advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister  and   Finance Minister in Poland. In 2002-3 he was Adviser to the Governor of the National Bank of Poland. Jacek    Rostowski  has published  many books and articles about the macroeconomic  aspects  of  creating  the  market  economy  in  the CEE and FSU countries. He  has  collaborated  with  the  CASE Foundation, Warsaw, on numerous  research projects and is a member of the Council of the Foundation.  He speaks fluent English, Polish and French.

Shyamsundar, Priya is Program Director and one of the founders of the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE). SANDEE is a capacity building network that supports research, training and policy analyses on environment-development issues in South Asia.   Dr. Shyamsundar also works as a consultant for the Environment Department of The World Bank, where she works on environmental policy concerns. Prior to founding SANDEE, Priya Shyamsundar worked as a Senior Program officer at the MacArthur Foundation. She has a Master's degree in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, India and a Ph. D from Duke University. Of late, Dr.
Shyamsundar's research and publications have largely focused on poverty and environment related issues.

Soros, George was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE). While a student at LSE, Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his professional and philanthropic activities. In 1956, Soros moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. Today he is chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC. Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa. Today he is chairman of the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the founder of a network of philanthropic organizations that are active in more than 50 countries. Based primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union—but also in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States—these foundations are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society. They work closely with OSI to develop and implement a range of programs focusing on civil society, education, media, public health, and human rights as well as social, legal, and economic reform. In recent years, OSI and the Soros foundations network have spent more than $400 million annually to support projects in these and other focus areas. In 1992, Soros founded Central European University, with its primary campus in Budapest. Soros is the author of eight books, including The Bubble of America Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (PublicAffairs, January 2004); George Soros on Globalization (2002); The Alchemy of Finance (1987); Opening the Soviet System (1990); Underwriting Democracy (1991); Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995); The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (1998); and Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000). His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world. George Soros's political activities are wholly separate from the Open Society Institute.

Stepanova, Ekaterina is an Economics Ph.D student at the University of Washington, focuses her research in the field of labor economics. Her area of interest particularly includes understanding household consumption behavior using demographic characteristics. Before joining PhD program at the University of Washington in 2000, Ms. Stepanova received her MA in Economics from the Central European University in Budapest. Her thesis work was related to gender pay inequality an Russian transitional economy. Ms. Stepanova holds her undergraduate degree in mathematical economics from the Novosibirsk State University in Russia.

Stone, Diane is Head of the CEU Masters of Arts in Public Policy Program joined the Center for Policy Studies at the Central European University in January 2004, taking leave of absence from the University of Warwick. She is a recipient of a two year Marie Curie Chair from the European Commission 6th Framework on Research and Technological Development. The Marie Curie Chair award supports her research work on global knowledge elites and transnational networks. Her previous appointment was at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdomwhere she was Reader in Politics and International Studies, Principal Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation and Senior Fellow, Institute of Governance and Public Management. She has also taught at Manchester University, the Australian National University and Murdoch University. She is an Australian Fulbright Scholar and undertook her research at Georgetown University in the USA. She has held visiting research positions at other universities in Australia and in Asia. During 1999, she was Visiting Scholar and Consultant at the Economic Policy for Poverty Reduction Division, the World Bank Institute in Washington DC. Professor Stone sits on the Governing Body of the Global Development Network, a world-wide association of research institutes concerned with issues of development and transition. In the United Kingdom, she is a Member of Council of the Overseas Development Institute, and of International Advisory Council, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Her most recent book was co-edited with Simon Maxwell, Director of ODI. Global Knowledge Networks and International Development: Bridges Accross Borders will be available from Routledge in late 2004.

Sundquist, Eva is currently working as Counsellor at Sweden's permanent representation to the EU, participating in EU Council working groups on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In addition to working three years at the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow, where the responsibilites included technical assistance, she has worked as desk officer for Russia, Ukraine and Moldova at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and an additional three years on the team working out Sweden's policy for    technical assistance to Central and Eastern Europe.    Instrumental in working out Sweden's substantial donation to the EERC, Ms Sundquist will give a donor's point of view.

Svejnar, Jan is the Everett E. Berg Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan. He is also a founder and Chairman of the Executive and Supervisory Committee of CERGE-EI in Prague (an American-style Ph.D. program in economics that educates the new generation of economists for Central-East Europe and the Newly Independent States). He serves as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of CSOB Bank, Governing Board member of the European Economic Association, Co-Editor of the Economics of Transition. He is also a Fellow of the European Economic Association and Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research (London) and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn). From 1996 to 2004, Professor Svejnar was the Executive Director of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan Business School where he established a leading research and outreach program on business and economic policy issues relating to the transition and emerging market economies. From 1992 to 1997 he served as the Founding Director of the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, establishing a leading western economic think tank in post communist countries. He also served as Co-Director of the Transition Programme at the Center for Economic Policy Research in London, President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, President of the International Association for the Economics of Labor-Management, Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and advisor to numerous policy makers, institutions and firms, including President Vaclav Havel and Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla of the Czech Republic, OECD, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, GE Capital, Expandia Bank, and SPT Telecom. In the 1990s, he was one of the chief architects of the Czech Republic’s economic reforms. Jan’s academic interests are in the areas of economic development and transition, labor economics and behavior of the firm. His research focuses on the determinants and effects of (a) government policies on firms and labor and capital markets, (b) corporate and national governance and performance, and (c) entrepreneurship. He is the author and editor of a number of books and has published widely in leading academic, policy and practitioner-oriented journals in advanced and emerging market economies, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Economica, Economics of Transition, European Business Forum, European Economic Review, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of the European Economic Association,  Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor Economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics.

Yan, Regina joined the Eurasia Foundation as a Vice President in June 2000. She also serves as the Foundation’s corporate Secretary and Treasurer. Ms. Yan’s responsibilities include the oversight of all Foundation financial and administrative functions in its corporate office as well as in its 12 field offices across former Soviet region. In addition, she served on the management team of the Media Viability Fund, a project providing technical assistance and loan funds to media outlets in Russia and Ukraine. Ms. Yan also manages the transformation of the Foundation’s incubated projects into independent institutions.    Two examples of this are the establishment of a new direct lending financing company in Armenia to continue the Foundation’s small business loan program and the spin-off of the economic research & education program. These processes involve multi-year efforts to enhance the new institution infrastructure including delicate negotiations with international funding partners and local institutional partners. From 1988 to 1992, Ms. Yan was program manager and financial officer of various international programs at the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Research Council. She worked on programs with China, Central Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.    From 1992-2000, Ms. Yan held various senior management positions at the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) where she provided management oversight to the IREX field operations in 22 countries. Ms. Yan was instrumental in developing and implementing a strategy to expand IREX’s programs beyond research and exchanges to include media and other technical assistance activities. She also launched its Asia program with Mongolia and China that included international conferences on regional cooperation, research projects on transition economy and international relations, and professional training programs. She received her B.A. from Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington and her graduate degree from University of Hawaii. She is a member of the National Association of Female Executives and the Society of Human Resources Management.