June 7, 2005

Speaker Biographies

Nancy Birdsall is president of the Center for Global Development, a policy-oriented research institution established in Washington, D.C., in October 2001. She is co-chair of a Center-sponsored working group, which recently released its final report: "The Hardest Job in the World: Five Crucial Tasks for the New President of the World Bank." Before launching the center, she 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 globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, she 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 fourteen years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as director of the policy research department. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs, including, most recently, Delivering on Debt Relief: From IMF Gold to a New Aid Architecture.

David de Ferranti has over twenty-five years of experience in international development, U.S. public policy, and investment project management, with leadership positions in international institutions, government, the private sector, and policy research organizations. He has worked extensively on Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as in the United States and Europe, and has expertise on economic policy, finance, education, health, nutrition, population, pensions, environmental protection, poverty reduction, tax policy, urban and rural development, housing, transport, and water supply. For the past six years, he served as head of the Latin America and the Caribbean group at the World Bank, where he was responsible for a $25 billion loan portfolio and 700 professionals in 14 locations, with a $160 million annual budget. Previously, he headed the World Bank's work in education, health, nutrition, population, and other social programs, and prior to that, in other areas, including infrastructure, environment investment, and African development. He has also worked at RAND, where he conducted and directed policy research on U.S. domestic programs.  His research and writing have dealt both with developing countries and with U.S. policies. He joins the Brookings Institution this year.

Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at AEI whose research focuses on global currencies, major emerging market economies, and the role of the multilateral lending institutions. He writes extensively on topics such as economic policy, fund arrangements, monetary reform, import restrictions, and exchange rates. Before joining AEI, he was a managing director and chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. Previously, he was deputy director in the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund.

Allan H. Meltzer is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University. He served as the honorary adviser to the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan from 1986 to 2002. he was a member of the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board during the Reagan administration. He has been an acting member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the U.S. Treasury and to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, which was appointed by Congress to review the role of these institutions. The author of several books and numerous papers on economic theory and policy, he is also a founder of the Shadow Open Market Committee. In 2002, he was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He received the first annual Irving Kristol Award and delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI’s annual dinner in February 2003.

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