May 11, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) in Seattle.  For over twenty years Mr. Eberstadt served as a member of Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies, and he continues to serve as a member of the visiting committee for the Harvard School of Public Health.  He is a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Advisory Committee for Voluntary Foreign Aid at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).  He is also a member of the Publications Committee for The Public Interest.  Mr. Eberstadt regularly consults for governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, USAID, and World Bank.  He has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security.  His books and monographs include Poverty in China, Fertility Decline in the Less Developed Countries, The Poverty of Communism, Foreign Aid and American Purpose, The Tyranny of Numbers, Comparing the Soviet and American Economies, Prosperous Paupers and Other Population Problems, and most recently, Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis.

Jeffrey G. Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics at Harvard University.  He served as chairman of the economics department from 1997 to 2000 and as the department’s director of undergraduate studies from 2001 to 2002.  He is also a faculty associate at the Center for International Development, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has taught at universities and research institutions around the world.  He was master of Harvard’s Mather House from 1986 to 1993 and has twice been awarded the Galbraith Prize for the best teacher in Harvard’s graduate economics program.  In addition, he was president of the Economic History Association from 1994 to 1995, and received its Hughes Prize for outstanding teaching in 2000.  His work has been published in journals such as American Economic Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics.  He is the author of over twenty books and monographs, including most recently Globalization in Historical Perspective (University of Chicago and NBER, 2003, ed. with M. Bordo and A. M. Taylor).

Mr. Williamson’s teaching and research interests focus on economic history and the contemporary Third World.  His recent research topics include the growth and distributional implications of the demographic transition in Asia from 1950 to 2025 and the Atlantic economy from 1820 to 1940; the impact of international migration, capital flows, and trade on factor price convergence in the greater Atlantic economy since 1830; the sources of globalization backlash before World War I; the causes of the cessation of convergence during the de-globalization years between 1914 and 1950; a detailed analysis of both the sources and consequences of the mass migrations before the 1920s and after the 1950s; and the economic implications of 1492.  He is currently researching two major topics: one establishing a database from which to explore the evolution of world factor prices and living standards since 1820; and one focusing on economic change in the Third World before 1940, including the debates over terms of trade, tariff policy, factor supply, de-industrialization, re-industrializa-tion, South-South mass migration, and the underlying economic-demographic fundamentals of growth.

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