Pascal Lamy has served as Director-General of the World Trade Organization since September 2005.

Previously, he was the Trade Commissioner of the European Union in Brussels from 1999 to 2004.

From 1994 until 1999, he served as Director-General of the team responsible for restructuring the Credit Lyonnaise.

The beginnings of Mr. Lamy’s career are marked by time spent in civil service at the French Finance Ministry, the Inspection Générale des Finances, and the Treasury Department.

He later became adviser to Economics and Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, and to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. From 1984 to 1994, Mr. Lamy worked in Brussels as chief of staff to Commission President, Jacques Delors.

A member of the French Socialist Party, Mr. Lamy is also politically active in the Mouvement Europeen. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’Honneur and has been honored with several international orders of merit.

THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY ICA

This is a CDDRL seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Cliff Tan is Consulting Professor and formerly Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for International Development. At SCID, Mr. Tan is writing a book on financial market retrospectives of the Asian financial crisis, how those might or might not differ from well-recorded views of policymakers and academics, and if they differ, whether they offer lessons for the financial market crises of today.  Mr. Tan is also a founding partner in a new charity that will partly invest in global microfinance, and occasionally consults to hedge funds

Prior to SCID, Mr. Tan headed up local markets strategy in fixed income and foreign exchange for Citigroup in Asia. Over 19 years of research on Asia and Japan, Mr. Tan worked as FX/Interest Rate Strategist and co-head of Asian Economics at Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS), Japan/Asia Economist at Wellington Management Company, LLC, and proprietary trading/credit risk economist at Bankers Trust Company. Mr. Tan has been voted a top five currency strategist several times by Asiamoney (including a #1 ranking in 2003) and has also been cited for work as both an economist and strategist by The Asset magazine.

Before entering financial markets, Mr. Tan covered Greater China at the US Federal Reserve Board, was a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and was a Visiting Fellow at the Korea Development Institute.

Mr. Tan received M.Phil. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Yale University, an A.M. in East Asian Regional Studies from Harvard University and an A.B. (magna cum laude) in Journalism and East Asian Studies from the University of Southern California.

Haggay is interested in Middle Eastern historical and contemporary economies, as well as in labor and family economics. This year he is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford's CDDRL, and he also teaches a course on Middle Eastern economic history at the Stanford's economics department.

During this year Haggay will examine the causes and implications of a major socio-economic transformation, which took place in the Gaza Strip during the second half of the twentieth century: The refugees who initially were less educated than the urbanites became by the 1980s better educated. Haggay suggests that the institution of the Palestinian family and ironically the refugees lack of access to credit market played a key role in the rise of the refugees to educational primacy. One plausible result of this transformation is the growth of the Hamas, whose Gazan leadership includes many highly educated men of refugee origin.

Last year, Haggay finished his Ph.D. in the economics department at the Hebrew University. His dissertation used the case of Ottoman Gaza for examining how the proximity of a semi-arid eco-system ­ a common characteriistic of wide regions of the Middle East ­ affected the demographic,, economic, and political development of an early modern Middle Eastern economy. His job market paper, analyzes a unique micro-dataset on protection payments, which villages made to armed nomadic tribes, for evaluating the interaction of this widespread but usually hidden institution with taxation, economic growth, and military technology. It demonstrates that strong predatory state could enhance economic development in an economy with multiple predators.

http://www.stanford.edu/~haggay/

Leonard Wantchekon, PhD is a Professor of Politics and Economics at the New York University. Wantchekon's areas of interest include political economy, development, applied game theory, and comparative politics.

He is the author of several articles on post-civil war democratization, resource curse, electoral clientelism and experimental methods in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Political Science Review, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Constitutional Political Economy, Political Africaine and Afrique Contemporaine.

Some of his recent publications include "The Paradox of 'Warlord' Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation", American Political Science Review, (Vol. 98, No1, 2004); and "Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa" (with Nathan Jensen), Comparative Political Studies, (Vol. 37, No. 7, 816-841, 2004).

Wantchekon is the editor of the Journal of African Development (JAD), formally known as Journal of African Finance and Economic Development (JAFED). He is the founding director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy, which is based in Benin (West Africa) and at New York University. He is currently serving on the APSA international committee as well as the APSA Africa initiative committee. He was also a division chair at the 2005 APSA Annual meetings in Washington DC.