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 in Seattle, Washington. He serves on the advisory board of the Korea Economic Institute of America, and is a founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Mr. Eberstadt regularly consults for governmental and international organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. He has published over 300 studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include The Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988), The Population of North Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995), The End of North Korea (AEI Press, 1999), Korea's Future and the Great Powers (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001) and, most recently, The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis & Catastrophe (Transaction, 2007).

Andrei Lankov is a history professor at the Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea. He previously taught Korean history at the Australian National University from 1996–2006. He has published three books in English on North Korea, including the North of the DMZ: Essays of Daily Life in North Korea (McFarland & Company, forthcoming). He writes weekly columns on North Korean society and daily life for the Korean Times, a major English-language daily in Seoul. He has also published pieces in the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and other major media outlets.

William Newcomb is a senior economic advisor with the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Before joining the treasury in 2005, he served for more than twenty years with the State Department as senior economist for Asia in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. From 2002–05, Mr. Newcomb was deputy director of the North Korea Working Group.

Deok Ryong Yoon is a visiting professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP). He is also an invited professor at the Institute for Korean Unification Studies at Yonsei University. He continues to serve as a member of expert groups and advisory committees in diverse ministries and presidential offices in South Korea. In addition to numerous books, he is the author of a variety of papers, including “Asian Monetary Cooperation: A Search for Regional Monetary Stability in the Post-Euro and the Post-Asian Crisis Era” in Economic Papers (2000), “Searching for a Better Regional Surveillance Mechanism in East Asia” (2002), “The Role of Regional Development Banks: Financing for Development and Solidarity in East Asia” (2003), “How to Finance North Korea’s Capital Requirements for Economic Recovery” in East Asian Review 16, no. 2 (2004), and “National Financial Revenue and Expenditure of North Korea” in North Korea Development Report 2003/4.

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