Transcript
ROBERT E. LITAN: We want to welcome you here for hopefully an informative discussion about what's going to happen this weekend at the annual Bank and Fund meeting. So we have a terrific panel to answer your questions. I'll introduce them in a second. But basically the format is going to be short introductory points, no more than five minutes per person. We've sort of split it up by expertise, and it will become evident what individual people want to talk about. And then we're going to go to your questions, and hopefully we'll have an interesting dialogue thereafter.
Short introductions, all these people are either affiliated in some combination with the Institute for International Economics, the Brookings Institution, or the Center for Global Development, and in some cases you see some people are affiliated with more than one of them. So, I'm not going to go into long detail about who all these people are, but I'm going to start at the far right, John Williamson at the IIE is one of the foremost experts on exchange rates, developed the target zone proposal, and I anticipate John will be talking about exchange markets. That's just a guess.
We have next to him—he's just changed his agenda. You don't have to, John—Carol Graham, who is the director of our global governance program at the Brookings Institution, who has written widely on third world economic development issues.
And so has our partner here, right there, Nancy Birdsall, who is president of the Center for Global Development. She used to be at the World Bank, and is one of the world's foremost experts on economic development. And we want to thank Nancy also for helping to put together this conference.
To my immediate left is Lael Brainard, who is deputy director of the National Economic Council during the Clinton administration, he's an expert on trade and economic development issues, and one of my partners I work with at Brookings.
And far left, not necessarily ideologically, is Michael Kremer, at Harvard and also at Brookings, and Michael has written widely on many, many topics. But the reason he's here is, he's done a lot of work on public health issues in the third world, also education issues.
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