Speaker biographies

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI and senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. 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, U.S. State Department, USAID, and World Bank. In 2006, he was appointed to the President’s Council on Bioethics. 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 for 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 Power (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001) and the forthcoming North Korea's Economy Between Crisis and Catastrophe (Transaction Books, 2006).

Dwight H. Perkins is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, whose faculty he joined in 1963. Previous positions at Harvard include associate director of the East Asian (now Fairbank) Research Center; chairman of the Department of Economics; director of the Harvard Institute for International Development, the University’s former multidisciplinary institute for research, teaching, and technical assistance on development policy; and director of the Harvard University Asia Center. Mr. Perkins has authored or edited twelve books and over a hundred articles on economic history and economic development, with special emphasis on the economies of China, Korea, Vietnam, and the other nations of East and Southeast Asia. He has served as an advisor or consultant on economic policy and reform to the governments of Korea, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. He has also been a long-term consultant to the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, various private corporations, and governmental agencies, including the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He has been a visiting professor or scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, the University of Washington, and Fudan University in Shanghai. He also served as a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer at eight colleges and universities in the U.S. during 1993–94. In 1997, he taught for a semester at the Fulbright Economic Training Program in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and has continued to teach in that program for several weeks each year since 1997.

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