Speaker biographies

William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africana Studies, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. He spent sixteen years as a research economist at the World Bank and is the author of the recent book, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, March 2006). He is also the author of four other books, including The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press, 2001), as well as more than forty articles in economics journals. His work has been discussed in numerous media outlets, including National Public Radio, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, and The Economist. His areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, including Mexico, Jamaica, Ghana, the Gambia, Colombia, Thailand, Russia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Bolivia, South Africa, and Pakistan. He is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics.

Robert Guest was until recently the Africa editor of The Economist magazine, based in London and Johannesburg. His reporting from Africa has won four international awards. In his book, The Shackled Continent, Guest seeks to explain why Africa is so poor and what can be done about it. He is currently the Washington correspondent for The Economist. Before joining The Economist, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and before that he was a freelance writer based in South Korea.

Adam Lerrick is a visiting scholar at AEI, the Friends of Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Economics at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, and director of the University’s Gailliot Center for Public Policy. He originated and leads the negotiation team of the Argentine Bond Restructuring Agency plc (ABRA). ABRA unites the interests of an estimated 30,000 European retail investors to create the largest foreign creditor in the Argentina’s $100-billion debt restructuring. Since 2001, Mr. Lerrick has served as advisor on international economic policy to the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress of the United States. He was separately an advisor on international economic policy to the majority leader of the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress from April 2001 to January 2003. He acted as the senior advisor to the chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory (“Meltzer”) Commission of the U.S. government. Formerly head of product development for the international capital markets at Salomon Brothers and then at Credit Suisse First Boston, Mr. Lerrick found solutions to the large-scale financing needs of major governments and multilateral borrowers. In the international capital markets, he designed and executed pioneering debt instruments for many governments, among them, Germany, France, Belgium, and Sweden. Mr. Lerrick has written, testified before Congress, and spoken widely on questions of development aid, debt relief, financial markets, sovereign debt crises, and the international financial system. His commentaries have been published in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Canada’s National Post, and he has appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, National Public Radio, Bloomberg Television, and PBS’s For the Record. His academic writings have been published in the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Restructuring Finance. He has been a featured speaker at conferences organized by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Emerging Markets Creditors Association.

Vance Serchuk is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at AEI, where he studies international organizations and the overlap between U.S. strategic interests and development policy. Previously he was a research associate at AEI, coordinating its defense and security policy program. He has also worked as a consultant for the Project for the New American Century and the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. Before joining AEI, Mr. Serchuk was a Fulbright scholar in the Russian Federation. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, The Weekly Standard, The Forward, and other publications.

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