Jeffrey A. Frankel is James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth. He directs the Program in International Finance and Macroeconomics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is also on the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which officially declared the 2001 recesssion. Nominated by President Clinton in 1996 to be a member of his Council of Economic Advisers, Frankel's responsibilities included international economics, macroeconomics, and the environment. Before coming to Harvard in 1999, he was Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, having joined the faculty in 1979. Past appointments also include the Federal Reserve, Institute for International Economics, International Monetary Fund, University of Michigan, and Yale University. His research interests include international finance, monetary policy, regional blocs, and international environmental issues. Books include American Economic Policy in the 1990s (2002). Born in San Francisco in 1952, he graduated from Swarthmore College in 1974, and received his economics PhD from MIT in 1978.
Perran Penrose is an economist trained in the Universities of Oxford and London, and has worked since 1970 in many countries in South and South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Central America, and Eastern Europe. He specialises in public finance and budgeting, and also in education planning and finance. In the 1970s he was a director of a major NGO; and taught in the University of Libya and what is now Addis Ababa University. In the 1980s he was managing director of a major consulting company and regional managing director of a leading consultancy group in Southern, Central and Eastern Africa. Since 1990 he has worked as an independent consultant.
He is at present engaged in a number of different advisory positions. He is chief technical advisor on financial policy analysis in the Ministry of Finance in Viet Nam, where he also advises the National Assembly on matters of budget oversight. He is working for Harvard University in Ethiopia on the budget planning reform, and advises the government of Thailand on the decentralisation of basic education. He has recently been engaged in Romania in a series of financial reforms; advised the Ministry of Finance in Jamaica on the economic reform programme there; and has worked for many years in East and West Africa.
He has been chairman and director on the boards of several NGOs. He was a Visiting Fellow of the University of East Anglia in Britain; is an Associate of the Centre for International Business and Management in the Judge Management Institute of Cambridge University; and a Tutor in the Centre of Financial Management Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London University, where he was co-author of the public finance course for the MSc in Public Policy by distance learning.
Stephen Peterson (Faculty Chair) has worked on public financial management and international development for over twenty-one years at Harvard University and is a Senior Fellow in Development at the Kennedy School of Government. In 1987 he was a founder of the Executive Program in Public Financial Management (under the Harvard Institute for International Development). He is a specialist in public financial management and its reform, with over nineteen years of experience as a resident advisor in Africa. He currently manages a project in Ethiopia which is in its eleventh year and is assisting that Government’s implementation of devolved reforms of expenditure planning, budgeting, accounting and integrated financial information systems. Through Harvard University’s Center for the Middle East, he assisted the Ministry of Finance of the Palestinian National Authority and through the United State’s Treasury Department’s Tax Advisory Service; he assisted several governments in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. His research interests include the design and implementation of effective public sector reform and the development of public financial information systems. He has authored several books and articles on public financial management, fiscal decentralization, and public management. He holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA in finance and management information systems from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Jay Rosengard, Lecturer in Public Policy, has 30 years of international experience designing, implementing, and evaluating development policies in: public finance and fiscal strategy, municipal finance and management, intergovernmental fiscal relations, banking and financial institutions development, microfinance, tax reform, management information systems, monitoring and evaluation, human resource development, and public administration. He has worked for a wide variety of multilateral and bilateral donors, as well as directly for host governments and private sector clients. Rosengard is currently Director of the Center for Business and Government's Financial Sector Program, which focuses on the development of bank and nonbank financial institutions and alternative financing instruments. This includes microfinance (small-scale lending and local savings mobilization), mainstream commercial banking (general and special-purpose banks), and wholesale financial intermediation (municipal development funds, venture capital funds, pooled financing, secondary mortgage facilities, and securitization). Rosengard is also Faculty Chair of the FIPED (Financial Institutions for Private Enterprise Development) Executive Program, which focuses on sustainable and effective microfinance and SME (small and medium enterprise) finance.
Guest Speaker:
Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor, served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. An eminent scholar and admired public servant, Mr. Summers has taught on the faculty at Harvard and MIT. He has served in a series of senior public policy positions, including political economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers, chief economist of the World Bank, and Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. In 1993 he received the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40. Mr. Summers received his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.
