Contacts: In Moscow:Marina Vasilieva (7-095) 745-7000 ext. 2045 or (7-095) 967-3167 ext. 2045 mvasilieva@worldbank.org In Washington:Christopher Neal(202) 473-7229 or (202) 390-8858 Cneal1@worldbank.org In St. Petersburg:Leita Jones7 921 180 4586 (St. Petersburg) Ljones2@worldbank.org ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, January 17, 2006—Transition, economic growth and inequality are among the key themes to be discussed by world-class economists and other specialists at the World Bank’s Annual Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE), to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia January 18-19.
The conference, organized by the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice-Presidency, is an opportunity for researchers to present and discuss new research on the factors behind development and poverty reduction. This year’s edition, held in Russia for the first time, features presentations of new research by invited experts on four themes, namely Growth After Transition: Is Rising Inequality Inevitable?, Economic Space, Governance, and Judiciary Foundations of a Market System.
The Conference will start its work at 9 a.m. at Hotel Pribaltiyskaya, 14 Korablestroiteley Street, St. Petersburg, on Wednesday, January 18, 2006.
Mikhail Oseyevsky, Deputy Governor of Saint Petersburg, as well as a representative of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of the Russian Federation, will greet the Conference participants with welcoming statements from the Russian and regional Governments.
The Conference will be opened by Vladimir Mau, Rector of the Academy of National Economy at the Government of the Russian Federation, and François Bourguignon, the Bank’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, who will make a presentation, Governance Institutions and Development: The Role of Elites.
This will be followed by a keynote address by Anders Aslund, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, entitled The Growth Surprise in Eurasia.
Later the same day, a session Growth after Transition – Is Rising Inequality Inevitable? is to feature papers on recent experience in China and Latin America, with reflections on the implications for Russia’s growth and inequality. Speakers include Pradeep Mitra and Guillermo Perry, respectively the Bank’s chief economists for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. At the related session on Economic Space, papers on economic policy and regional disparities in Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, China and India, will be presented. The third session, chaired by Frannie Leautier, Vice President of the World Bank Institute (WBI), examines Governance, with papers focused on the state in Latin America, corporate governance, and privatization.
Yegor Gaidar, of the Institute for the Economy in Transition, will deliver the keynote on the second day of the conference, on Interaction of Political and Economic Transition, after which Matthew Stephenson of Harvard University, and World Bank experts will discuss judicial reform, with emphasis on the European and Central Asian context.
The ABCDE conference will be followed immediately by the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) Policy Workshop on Education and Global Development, to be held the afternoon of Thursday, January 19. Its objective is to provide insights into global education challenges critical for economic growth, and provide an opportunity for Russian experts to share new ideas in this area, which Russia seeks to emphasize during its G 8 chairmanship. Leading international and Russian experts will discuss approaches to raising quality and relevance of higher education through global qualifications frameworks and definition of a global instrument to assess the quality of higher education.
Also following the ABCDE is the seventh annual conference of the Global Development Network (GDN), also in St. Petersburg from January 19-23. Its overall theme is Institutions and Development: At the Nexus of Global Change. Speakers there include Martin Wolf, author and columnist with The Financial Times, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, now director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University, among others.
In addition to chairing a GDN conference session on Learning and Innovating for Development, WBI Vice President Frannie Leautier will also launch a book,Cities in a Globalizing World: Governance, Performance, and Sustainability, of which she is editor, at the Rosbalt News Agency at 12 noon (local time) January 19. -####- For more information on the ABCDE conference, including a full program and texts of some of the papers to be presented, please visit www.worldbank.org/abcde. For more information on the GDN conference, visit www.gdnet.org. |
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