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).

C. Peter Timmer is a leading scholar-practitioner in food policy and agricultural development. He is one of the most influential development analysts arguing for attention to the rural economy as a key factor in achieving both rapid economic growth and sustainable poverty reduction. After a thirty-year career as a distinguished professor at Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard Universities (for twenty-one years on three faculties) and at the University of California, San Diego (where he also served as dean), Timmer joined the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC, as a senior fellow in 2004. In July 2007, he will return to academia as a professor of food policy at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. He will remain a non-resident fellow at CGD. Throughout his career, Timmer has demonstrated the constant interaction between scholarly research for the academic profession and useful analysis for policymakers in Indonesia and other developing countries. This interaction has resulted in a very large volume of published articles and books—much of it relating specifically to Asian issues—along with dozens of important policy and analytical writings about critical Indonesian economic problems. He has demonstrated that much of the historical success in poverty reduction in developing countries originated in appropriate policies for agriculture and rural enterprises, with adequate funding for rural infrastructure.

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