December 13, 2004
Speaker Biographies
Nancy Birdsall is president of the Center for Global Development, a policy-oriented research institution that opened its doors in Washington, D.C., in October 2001. Before 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 globalization 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 fourteen 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, 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; 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 seventy-five articles for books and scholarly journals published in English and Spanish.
Sebastian Mallaby is a member of the Washington Post editorial board. His interests cover a wide variety of domestic and international issues, including globalization, international development, and U.S. economic policy. In 2003, he served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he wrote a history of the World Bank under James Wolfensohn. The book, titled The World’s Banker, was published by the Penguin Press in October 2004. Mr. Mallaby joined the Post in 1999 after thirteen years with The Economist newspaper of London. While at The Economist, he worked in London, where he wrote about international finance; in Africa, where he covered Nelson Mandela’s release and the collapse of apartheid; and in Japan, where he covered the break down of the country’s political and economic consensus. Between 1996 and 1999, he was based in The Economist’s Washington bureau and wrote the magazine’s weekly Lexington column on American politics and foreign policy. He has also contributed to numerous other publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, the New York Times, Policy Review, and The New Republic. He is the author of After Apartheid: The Future of South Africa, which was listed by the New York Times as one of the notable books of 1992.
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. Mr. Meltzer 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, Mr. Meltzer 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.
Radek Sikorski is the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative and a resident fellow at AEI. He was Poland’s deputy minister for foreign affairs from 1998 to 2001. As the country’s deputy minister for defense in the first democratically elected government after the fall of Communism, he spearheaded Poland’s drive to join NATO. From 1986 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a war correspondent to Afghanistan and Angola, contributing to the Spectator (London) and National Review. He is the author of Dust of the Saints: A Journey to Herat in Time of War (1989) and The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland (1997). His photograph from Afghanistan received the World Press Photo Award in 1988. From 1981 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a political refugee in the United Kingdom, where he graduated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University.
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