RBA Annual Conference – 2002 Biographies of Contributors

Nancy Birdsall

Nancy Birdsall is President of 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, Ms 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 globalisation and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions.

From 1993 to 1998, Ms Birdsall was Executive Vice-President of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, she spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as Director of the Policy Research Department.

Ms Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs, including, most recently, Population Matters: Demographic Change, Economic Growth, and Poverty in the Developing World; Washington Contentious: Economic Policies for Social Equity in Latin America; and New Markets, New Opportunities? Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World. She has also written more than 75 articles for books and scholarly journals published in English and Spanish. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of US and Latin American newspapers and periodicals.

Ms Birdsall has been researching and writing on economic development issues for more than 25 years. Her most recent work focuses on the relationship between income distribution and economic growth.

Ms Birdsall is a member of the Board of Directors of the Population Council. She has chaired the board of the International Center for Research on Women and has also served on the boards of the Social Science Research Council and the Overseas Development Council. She has served on a number of committees and working groups of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ms Birdsall holds a PhD in economics from Yale University and an MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Benoît Cœuré

Between September 1997 and June 2002, Benoît Cœuré was chief economic adviser to the director of France's Treasury. Previously, he had served as an economist at INSEE and at the French Treasury. Between 1999 and 2001, he was also head of foreign exchange and economic policy, in charge of European policy coordination (the stability and growth pact, broad economic policy guidelines and the Eurogroup), foreign exchange markets, and the control of foreign investments and foreign assets.

Benoît Cœuré is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and of Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE). He holds a diplôme d'études approfondies in economic policy and a BA in Japanese. He has contributed to various French and international economic journals and books and he is a part-time professor of economic science at Ecole Polytechnique.

Benoît Cœuré was appointed deputy chief executive of the French debt management agency, Agence France Trésor, on 3 June 2002.

David Dollar

David Dollar is head of the macroeconomics and growth group in the Research Department of the World Bank. He co-authored, with Paul Collier, the Bank's report Globalization, Growth, and Poverty. He heads up the Bank's effort to more systematically collect data from firms in developing countries in order to examine the effect of the investment climate on market structure, competition, and productivity. He co-authored, with Lant Pritchett, the World Bank study, Assessing Aid. Before joining the Research Department, Dr Dollar was the World Bank's policy advisor to Vietnam from 1989 until 1995, a period of intense reform, adjustment, and opening to the international economy. Prior to working at the World Bank, Dr Dollar was an assistant professor of Economics at UCLA and a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He has a PhD in economics from New York University and a BA in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.

Steve Dowrick

Steve Dowrick was appointed Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce at the Australian National University in 1996. He currently holds an Australian Research Council Senior Fellowship and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. He has published extensively in leading international journals such as The American Economic Review and the Economic Journal.

Following his PhD from the University of Warwick in the UK, he published a number of papers on the economics of union-employer bargaining, exploring the interaction between product and labour markets. More recently his research has focused on economic growth, examining the factors that promote convergence as well as the factors that explain the failure of global convergence. An offshoot of this research on growth has led to the development, with John Quiggin, of a new multilateral welfare index (the true Afriat index) which avoids the twin problems of exchange rate bias and substitution bias in international comparisons of income and broader social indicators.

Edward M Gramlich

Mr Gramlich took office in November 1997 as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to fill an unexpired term ending in January 2008.

Mr Gramlich received a BA from Williams College in 1961, an MA in economics (1962) and a PhD in economics in 1965, both from Yale University.

Before becoming a member of the Board, Mr Gramlich served as Dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan from 1995 to 1997. He also served as Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan (1976–97), Chair of the Economics Department (1983–86; 1989–90), and Director of the Institute of Policy Studies (1979–83; 1991–95).

From 1994 to 1996 he served as Chair of the Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security. In 1986–87, Mr Gramlich was both Deputy and Acting Director of the Congressional Budget Office. He also served as Director of the Policy Research Division at the Office of Economic Opportunity (1971–73), Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution (1973–76), and in the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Board (1965–70).

David Gruen

David Gruen became Head of Economic Research Department at the Reserve Bank of Australia in May 1998. He has been with the Bank for 14 years, working in the Economic Analysis and Economic Research Departments. From August 1991 to June 1993, he was visiting lecturer in the Economics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Before joining the Reserve Bank, he worked as a research scientist in the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University. He holds PhD degrees in physiology from Cambridge University, England and in economics from the Australian National University.

Peter Harper

Peter Harper is currently acting Deputy Australian Statistician for Economic Statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). His substantive position is Head of the ABS's Economic Accounts Division, which is responsible for Australia's national accounts, balance of payments, prices and government finance statistics among others. He has had extensive experience in macroeconomic statistics, and he was responsible for the implementation of a number of significant recent changes to Australia's national accounts, including the introduction of SNA93. He is actively involved in a range of international statistical issues. Peter spent three years at the International Monetary Fund in the early 1990s where he worked as an expert on balance of payments statistics.

Ken Henry

Ken Henry was born in Taree NSW. He completed a first-class honours degree in economics at the University of NSW in 1979. From February 1980 to September 1984 he was a lecturer in the Economics Department of the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand). He completed his PhD in 1982. In September 1984 he returned to Australia, accepting a position in Treasury's Taxation Policy Division. He was a member of the Treasury team that put together the Government's draft White Paper on Tax Reform (published in June 1985) and contributed to the development of the Government's tax reform package (Reform of the Australian Taxation System, September 1985).

From September 1986 to June 1991, Dr Henry worked as a senior adviser to the Treasurer. He advised the Treasurer on taxation policy and administration, retirement incomes policy, industry policy and microeconomic reform (including telecommunications reform). At the end of June 1991 he returned to the Treasury as head of the Microeconomic Modelling Unit. In July 1992 he took up the position of Minister (Economic and Financial Affairs) in the Australian Delegation to the OECD in Paris.

Dr Henry returned to the Treasury in January 1994 as head of the Taxation Policy Division. In August 1997 he was appointed Chairman of the Government's Taxation Task Force, responsible for providing advice to the Government on tax reform options. In October 1998 he was promoted to the position of Executive Director (Deputy Secretary) of Treasury's Economic Group, and a member of the Treasury Executive Board. In that role he had executive responsibility for domestic macroeconomic policy advice, domestic economic forecasting, and advice on international economic issues (including Australia's relationship with the multilateral international financial institutions).

On 27 April 2001, Dr Henry commenced his appointment as Secretary to the Treasury.

Masahiro Kawai

Mr Masahiro Kawai is the Deputy Vice Minister for International Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Japan.

He joined the Ministry of Finance in July 2001. Before joining the Ministry of Finance, Mr Kawai was a Professor of Economics at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. Mr Kawai has served as the Chief Economist of the World Bank's east Asia and Pacific Region during 1998–2001. In addition, he has served as a Special Research Advisor for the Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy (currently, the Policy Research Institute) in Japan's Ministry of Finance, as well as a Coordinator of the Japan Financial Markets Development Committee for the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council. He has also served as a consultant for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and for the International Monetary Fund. Before joining the University of Tokyo in 1986, Mr Kawai worked for the Brookings Institution (1977–78) as a Research Fellow and taught at the Johns Hopkins University (1978–86, 1988) as an Assistant and Associate Professor. He also taught at the University of British Columbia (1991–92) as a Visiting Associate Professor. The articles, essays, and reviews written by Mr Kawai have been published extensively in professional journals and books and cover the fields of international finance, open macroeconomics, Asian money and capital markets, contemporary Japanese economy, international development finance, economics of commodity and futures markets, and housing demand. His recent book is The New World Fiscal Order: Implications For Industrialized Nations (co-edited with C Eugene Steuerle), Urban Institute, Washington DC, 1996. Mr Kawai received his BA and MA in Economics from the University of Tokyo, his MS in Statistics and his PhD in Economics from Stanford University.

Adarsh Kishore

Adarsh Kishore is presently Additional Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. After a short period of research and teaching, he entered the Indian Administrative Service in 1969. He holds a first-class degree in Political Science and PhD in Political Economy. He published a fairly well acclaimed research work entitled Land, Stage and Poverty in 1995. He also has to his credit another published book based on his post-doctoral research work on Economic Reforms: State-Market Synergy at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University, UK, in which he has examined the changing role of the State in the context of stabilisation, structural adjustment, and economic reforms and the role of international financial institutions. He has published several papers in academic journals.

Dr Kishore has contributed significantly towards delineation of economic reforms and structural adjustment process and strategy both as Principal Finance Secretary and as Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister and Principal Secretary to the Government for Policy Planning in the Indian State of Rajasthan. Dr Kishore worked as the Principal Finance Secretary to the Government of Rajasthan from 1993 to 1999. Subsequently, he contributed to policy as senior advisor to the State Government in his capacity as Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister Rajasthan and Policy Planning from October 1999 to September 2000.

Dr Kishore made painstaking efforts in the State Government to initiate the economic reform process. He also rationalised public expenditure and got self-imposed ceilings introduced on borrowings and the guarantees by the State Government in an effort to impose the fiscal discipline. He was instrumental in evolving a Memorandum of Understanding between the State Government and the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, scheduling a reform process in the State in April 1999.

His current responsibilities since October 2000 include the Government of India's interface with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and other multilateral financial institutions, interactions with the United Nations organisations, management of India's external debt, economic reforms, matters related to the external finance and policy issues in various sectors of the economy. He represents India on the Board of Governors of IFAD as Alternate, G-24 and G-77 as Deputy and the International Development Association (IDA) as the borrowers' representative for South Asia.

Melih Nemli

Mr Melih Nemli is Deputy Director General of Foreign Economic Relations of the Undersecretariat of Treasury, Turkey since 2000. Before he was appointed to his current post he was with the International Monetary Fund as Assistant to Executive Director between 1995 and 2000. He also served at the Undersecretariat of Treasury as Department Head in charge of IMF Relations from 1993 to 1995. He is a graduate of Middle East Technical University and has his Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Administration. Mr Nemli also holds a MA degree in Economics from Eastern Michigan University. He was born in 1961 and is married with one daughter.

Terry O'Brien

Terry O'Brien is head of the Australian Treasury's Macrodynamic Unit, after several years as Specialist Adviser in Treasury's international divisions. As part of those responsibilities, he is Australia's finance representative at the officials' meetings of the G-20 grouping of major economies. Since first joining Treasury in late 1972, he has worked in tax policy, fiscal policy, industry policy as well as international economic areas, and from 1984 to 1991, he worked in the Office of National Assessments as Head of its Resources and Finance Branch. From 1995 to 1997, he was Australia's senior Treasury representative at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including a period as a Deputy Chair of the OECD's Economic Development and Review Committee, responsible for the Economic Surveys of member countries. He is an honours graduate in economics from the University of Queensland, and holds a Masters Degree in economics from the Australian National University.

Maria Ramos

Maria Ramos obtained her MSc in Economics in 1992 from the University of London, BCom Honours (Economics) in 1987 (with a first-class pass) from the University of the Witwatersrand, BCom in 1986 from the University of the Witwatersrand and an Institute of Bankers Diploma (CAIB) in 1983 from the Institute of Bankers.

Ms Ramos is currently the Director-General of the National Treasury, SA (since 1 July 1996).

From May 1995 until June 1996 she was appointed as the Deputy Director-General: Financial Planning, Department of Finance. From September 1994 to April 1995, she worked as a Research Officer at the Centre for Research into Economics and Finance, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). From 1992 to 1994 she was a Lecturer in Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand, SA. Between 1989 and 1991 she worked as a lecturer in Economics at the University of South Africa. Between 1990 and 1994 she was engaged in the following projects: Research Associate, Centre for the Study of the South African Economy and International Finance, LSE (1990–94); Project Leader, Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG), Inflation Project, African National Congress (1992–93); and Co-ordinator, Economics Study Commission, Centre for Development Studies (1989–90).

From 1978–88 she held various positions (including managerial) within the First National Bank, SA. Ms Ramos has published and presented a number of papers nationally and internationally.

She was voted the 2001 Business Woman of the Year. She was a recipient of the following awards: British Council Scholarship (Helen Suzman Award), 1991 and 1992; Fullbright Scholarship, 1991 (not taken up); Nedbank/Old Mutual Budget Competition, 1989; Economic Society's Senbank Prize for Honors Dissertation, 1988 – ‘Clower's Dual Decision Hypothesis and Keynes’ Theory'; Barclays Bank Graduate Scholarship, 1983; Santam Bank Marketing Prize, 1982; and Institute of Bankers Marketing Prize, 1982. She is also a Global Leader for Tomorrow for the World Economic Forum (1998).

Y Venugopal Reddy

Dr Y Venugopal Reddy (born 17 August 1941), assumed charge as Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India on 14 September 1996.

As Deputy Governor his responsibilities include monetary policy, credit policy, public debt, exchange rate and also external investments and operations, economic analysis and policy, and government accounts.

Before joining the Reserve Bank of India, he held positions of Secretary (Banking) in the Ministry of Finance and Additional Secretary, Ministry of Commerce in the Government of India.

A career civil servant, he spent most of his career working in the areas of finance and planning both at provincial and central government levels.

He has been associated with several policy-related Committees, more recently as a Member of the National Statistical Commission; Chairman, Standing Committee on International Standards and Codes; and Chairman, Expert Committee to Review the System of Administered Interest Rates and Other Related Issues.

His academic stints include: Visiting Fellow, International Relations Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, London; a full-time UGC Visiting Professor in the Department of Business Management, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India; full-time Visiting Faculty, Administrative Staff College of India and he continues to be Honorary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies at Hyderabad, India. He has several publications to his credit, mainly in areas relating to international finance, planning and public enterprises. In 1998, he was conferred a Degree of Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) by Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati.

Moisés J Schwartz

Mr Schwartz worked at Banco de México from 1986 to December 2000. His last position at the central bank was that of Director of Macroeconomic Analysis. Mr Schwartz has also been a Consultant to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a Professor of Economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). Mr Schwartz holds an undergraduate degree in economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and a PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has participated in numerous seminars on monetary policy, exchange rate policy, banking supervision and related subjects.

Timothy M Smeeding

Timothy M Smeeding is the Maxwell Professor of Public Policy, Professor of Economics and Public Administration, and Director of Maxwell's Center for Policy Research. He is also the President of the Luxembourg Income Study (<www.lisproject.org>), a non-profit research and data organisation which he co-founded in 1983. He is currently a visiting Research Professor at the University of New South Wales Social Policy Research Centre. In 1994–95, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University where he now serves on their special projects Advisory Board. Professor Smeeding's research is focused on national and cross-national aspects of economic inequality, poverty, and public policy toward vulnerable groups such as children, the aged and the disabled.

Robert Hunter Wade

Robert Hunter Wade is Professor of Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A New Zealand citizen, he has taught at Victoria, Sussex, Princeton, MIT, and Brown universities; and held Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Russell Sage Foundation (New York), and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin). In the 1980s Robert worked as a staff economist at the World Bank, and later as an analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment, an arm of the US Congress.

Robert's research is about the wealth and poverty of nations. He has explored the connections between institutions and economic performance in sites ranging from villages in Italy and India, to bureaucracies in India, Korea and Taiwan, to the international financial institutions, particularly the World Bank. Robert is also studying world income distribution, the world monetary system, and the role of dominant states in setting world rules that rebound to their benefit and obstruct the development of poorer countries.

Robert's books include Irrigation and Agricultural Politics in South Korea (1982); Village Republics: Economic Conditions of Collective Action in South India (1988); and Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (1990). The latter won the American Political Science Association's award for Best Book in Political Economy (for the years 1989–91).

For the two-volume history of the World Bank, called The World Bank: Its First Half Century (Brookings Institution, 1997), Robert wrote the history of the World Bank's engagement with environmental issues (‘Greening the Bank: the struggle over the environment, 1970–95’, vol 2, chapter 13).

More recently, Robert has written extensively about the Asian financial crisis and about the governance of international financial markets. He wrote a ‘By Invitation’ essay for The Economist on world income distribution (28 April 2001). Robert is currently working on a book about the World Bank and the United States, called ‘Paved With Good Intentions’.

Shang-Jin Wei

Shang-Jin Wei is an advisor at the International Monetary Fund, and a senior fellow in Economic Studies and the New Century Chair in International Trade and Economics at the Brookings Institution. He is also a research fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Development, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. His areas of expertise include international finance, trade, corruption, transition economies, China, and reform strategies. Currently, Dr Wei is working on a book about corruption and globalisation.

Dr Wei is the author of Economic Globalization: Finance, Trade, and Policy Reforms (Beijing University Press, 2000) and co-author (with J Frankel and E Stein) of ‘Regional Trading Blocs in the World Economy’ (Institute for International Economics, 1997). His work has been published in leading academic journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of International Economics, and reported in The Economist and Business Week magazines, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, The Asian Wall Street Journal and several other newspapers.

During 1992–2000, Dr Wei was on the faculty of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government first as an assistant professor and then an associate professor. He has also held consulting and research positions at numerous international organisations, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Asian Development Bank, United Nations Development Program, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Dr Wei is a graduate of Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He holds a Masters Degree in Economics from Pennsylvania State University, and received both his Masters in Business Administration (finance) and PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Xie Ping

Xie Ping is the Director General of the People's Bank of China's (PBC) Research Department, a position he has held since 1998. He has had a long and distinguished career with the PBC, having held a number of important positions, including Governor of the Hunan Branch and Deputy Director of the Policy Research Department.

Dr Ping is the author of a number of books and papers published in China, including, most recently, Challenges for China's Monetary Policy in the New Millenium; The Monetary Policy in the Progress of Transition; and Options of Financial System in China. He won the prestigous Sun YeFang Economic Science Award in 1995 and 2000.

Dr Ping holds a range of positions beyond his official duties with the PBC. These include Secretary General of the China Society for Finance and Banking, Chief Editor of the Journal of Financial Research, Senior Research Fellow of the Financial Study Center of the China Academy of Social Science, and Professor of the Graduate School of Xinan University of Finance and Economics.

Dr Ping holds a PhD in economics from the Renmin University, and a Master of Economics from the Xinan University of Finance and Economics.