Anders Åslund is specializing on postcommunist economic transformation, especially the Russian and Ukrainian economies. In January 2006, he joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, as a senior fellow. From 1994 till 2005, he worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as a senior associate and Director of the Russian and Eurasian Program. He also teaches at Georgetown University. Dr. Åslund has served as a senior economic advisor to the governments of Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He has been a Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and a Swedish diplomat, serving in Kuwait, Geneva and Moscow. He earned his doctorate from Oxford University.

Dr. Åslund is the author of eight books, including How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of the Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Russia’s Capitalist Revolution (Peterson Institute, 2007), Building Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2002), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform (Cornell University Press, 1989), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985). He has also edited twelve books, most recently, Europe After Enlargement, and he has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Interest, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal.

His Excellency Zurab Noghaideli assumed the prime ministerial position in Georgia in February 2005. He started his political career in the Green Party of Georgia in the 1990s. Noghaideli was a member of the Parliament of Georgia from 1992 to 2000, where he chaired the Parliamentary Committee on Environment Protection and Natural Resources (1992-1995) and the Parliamentary Tax and Income Committee (1999-2000). He was appointed Minister of Finance in the government of Eduard Shevarnadze in May 2000, but was dismissed from this post in 2002 due to his growing dissent with the corrupt policies of the government. During these years, he was considered a member of a team of young reformists headed by Zurab Zhvania and Mikheil Saakashvili and proved to be quite an effective minister. After the Rose Revolution of November 2003, Noghaideli returned to government as the economic adviser to the acting president Nino Burjanidze. He was re-appointed to his old post as Minister of Finance in February 2004 in the government of Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania.

Noghaideli graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in physics in 1988. He also specialized in the Institute of Geology of the Academy of Sciences of Estonia.

Anders Åslund joined the Institute for International Economics in 2006. He has served previously as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2003 and as codirector of the Carnegie Moscow Center's project on Economies of the Post-Soviet States. He joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate in October 1994. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. His work examines the transformation of formerly socialist economies to market-based economies. While the central areas of his studies are Russia and Ukraine, he also focuses on the broader implications of economic transition.

Åslund has served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is co-chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw.

He is the author of Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2001), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, 2d ed. (Cornell University Press, 1991), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985) and editor or coeditor of several books, including with CDDRL Director, Michael McFaul, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

Trygve Olson is a political and public affairs professional who brings nearly twenty years of experience, working on five continents, to his profession. He has served in his present capacity since January 2001, and also served as IRI's Resident Program Officer in Lithuania in 1997.

Prior to rejoining IRI in 2001, Mr. Olson was a founding partner in the grassroots lobbying, political consulting and public affairs firm Public Issue Management, LLP. While a partner at Public Issue Management, Trygve managed a number of high profile grassroots lobbying campaigns for clients in the aviation, technology, and healthcare sectors. For two years he co-managed the grassroots side of a national campaign on behalf of several of America's largest technology companies and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Also during this prior Mr. Olson served as the primary campaign consultant to a coalition that was victorious in the 2000 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections.

A native of Wisconsin, Trygve worked in the Administration of then-Governor Tommy Thompson and also ran a number of Congressional, State Senatorial and State Legislative campaigns during the early and mid 1990's. Over the course of his career in politics, Mr. Olson has worked on in excess of 100 campaigns for all levels of public office from the local to national level. Since first volunteering for IRI in 1995 -- when he went to Poland to run a get out the vote campaign for young people -- Mr. Olson has helped advise political parties and candidates in numerous countries throughout the world including nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Serbia.

Trygve is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He currently makes his home in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife, Erika Veberyte, who serves as the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Speaker of the Lithuanian Parliament.