Speaker biographies

Yegor Gaidar was the first prime minister to serve in Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s government in 1992, and was a leading architect of Russia’s post-communist economic reforms.  He also served during the early 1990s as minister of economy and finance for the Russian Federation and as counselor to President Yeltsin.  Before entering politics, he worked as a journalist for Pravda and as director of the Institute of Economic Policy under the National Academy of Economics in the U.S.S.R.  Since leaving the Kremlin, he was elected as a deputy to the Duma and, until 2004, acted as a co-chairman of the Union of Rightist Forces, the center-right political party.  Since 1996, he has been director of the Institute of the Economy in Transition, based in Moscow.  He has had several books and over a hundred articles on economic reform and post-communist transition published.  He is an honorary professor at the University of California-Berkeley and the Terry Sanford Distinguished Lecturer at Duke University.

Christopher DeMuth has been president of AEI since 1986.  He previously practiced law and was an economic consultant, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was editor and publisher of Regulation magazine, and served on the White House staffs of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.  A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Chicago Law School, Mr. DeMuth has published essays on domestic policy and politics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, Commentary, The American Enterprise, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

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