Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (as of July 1, 2007).

In addition he works as a consultant to Google.org, is a non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development, and is a senior fellow of BREAD. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in Economics and in 1988 from MIT with a PhD in Economics.

After finishing at MIT Lant joined the World Bank, where he held a number of positions in the Bank's research complex between 1988 and 1998, including as an adviser to Lawrence Summers when he was Vice President 1991-1993. From 1998 to 2000 he worked in Indonesia. From 2000 to 2004 Lant was on leave from the World Bank as a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2004 he returned to the World Bank and moved to India where he worked until May 2007.

He has been part of the team producing many World Bank reports, including: World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for Development, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why (1998), Better Health Systems for Indias Poor: Findings, Analysis, and Options (2003), World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for the Poor, Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reforms (2005).

In addition he has authored (alone or with one of his 22 co-authors) over 50 papers published in refereed journals, chapters in books, or as articles, as least some of which are sometimes cited. In addition to economics journals his work has appeared in specialized journals in demography, education, and health. In 2006 he published his first solo authored book Let Their People Come.

Lant, an American national, was born in Utah in 1959 and raised in Boise Idaho. Perhaps because of this, he has worked in, or traveled to, over forty countries and has lived in three other countries: Argentina (1978-80), Indonesia (1998-2000), and India (2004-2007).

During the past 40 years, Professor Hu has been teaching and conducting research in health economics, particularly in healthcare financing and the economics of tobacco control.  Hu was a Fulbright scholar in China. He has served as consultant or advisor to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, the Rand Corporation, the Ministry of Health in the People's Republic of China, Department of Health and Welfare in Hong Kong, Department of Health in the Republic of China (Taiwan), and many private research institutions and foundations. 

Professor Hu will speak to us immediately after an April trip to China, sharing his research and perspectives on the economics of tobacco control and the debate about healthcare system reforms in China (including a possible link between the two through financing expansions in coverage through increased tobacco taxation).

This is the second meeting of the “Just Supply Chains” working group, to be held at Stanford University on May 16-17, 2008. It will builds on the themes and debates that came out of our first meeting, held at MIT in January, 2008, but extends them by focusing more on issues related to national level and global regulation. Please find, attached, a description of the Just Supply Chains project.  

Our first meeting brought together an exciting group of academics, business managers, leaders of various labor-rights NGOs, and representatives of the ILO to discuss the role of corporate codes of conduct and other private voluntary efforts have played in promoting just employment relations in global supply chains. We focused on issues of fair compensation, decent and healthy working conditions, and rights of association. Although this first meeting also discussed some innovative experiments taking place within certain sectors or even within individual nation-states, the bulk of our time was spent debating the possibilities and limitations of private voluntary regulatory efforts promoted by both corporations and NGOs.

Five key themes/questions emerged from our January meeting: 

1. What are the costs and benefits associated with traditional labor compliance programs and how are these costs and benefits distributed among the different actors operating across global supply chains?
2. Related to this first theme is a second set of questions about “ethical consumption.”
3. A third issue that emerged from our discussions in January centered on independent unions and the rights of individual workers to associate and bargain collectively for improved wages, working conditions, and work hours.
4. Our fourth set of concerns builds directly on the previous issues: What can we learn from various national-level experiments with regulatory reform, especially in some of the larger developing countries?
5. Finally, how do global governance arrangements, in particular as they relate to bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements impact the promotion of just working conditions across global supply chains?

These five themes will be the focus of our May 16-17 workshop at Stanford. As with our first workshop, our minimal hope is to establish a common basis of knowledge and generate lively discussions around these important issues. Our more ambitious agenda is to generate a collaborative research agenda on these issues – research that will have an important impact not only on various academic disciplines but also on real-world practice and policy. To facilitate these two goals, we have once again invited a diverse group of academics, business managers, and NGO and IGO representatives to share their respective knowledge and engage in collective discussions and debates.

» Just Supply Chains - May Papers and Powerpoints (password protected)