Future Challenges: Global Development Beyond the Financial Crisis

Hosted by Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and the Center for the Study of Asia

Moderated by Adil Najam, director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Global Development Beyond the Financial Crisis examines the long-term fallout of last year’s global financial collapse and the resulting stimulus spending. The panelists are William Grimes, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of international relations, Shahrukh Rafi Khan, a visiting professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College, and Michael Walton, a lecturer in international development at the Harvard Kennedy School. They debate the role of the International Monetary Fund, the United States, East Asia, and other players in reconstructing the world economy.

Khan begins by discussing the role of international institutions in managing global recovery, particularly the newly strengthened International Monetary Fund and the Group of Twenty, which seems to have taken the place of the more exclusive Group of Eight. He notes that even wealthy countries will experience some upheaval: two-thirds of the world’s 80 high-income economies have “stable or declining” manufacturing, “so they have their work cut out for them.” Grimes follows with a brief talk on the East Asian economic bloc, which he says “is coming out of this crisis faster and stronger than anyone else.” He applauds Asian countries for opening their economies, but wonders if China in particular will be able to transition from buying U.S. debt to promoting demand-centric growth within its borders. Walton concludes by exploring policy avenues that would lead to successful moderate transformation for developing countries. While the recent financial crisis was a flaw, not a fundamental failure, of capitalism, he says, we should not expect that the transition out of debt and collapse will be easy for developing nations.

A question-and-answer period follows.

October 9, 2009, noon
Pardee House

Video length is 01:27:13.

About the speakers:
William W. Grimes is a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of international relations and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Asia at Boston University. He has published extensively on Japanese monetary policy and the impacts of financial regionalism and globalization in Japan and East Asia and is the author of Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism (2008).

Shahrukh Rafi Khan is a visiting professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College. From 1996 to 2002, he was executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is the author of several books on trade, labor, and education in the developing world, including Export Success and Industrial Linkages: The Case of Readymade Garments in South Asia (2009).

Michael Walton is a lecturer in international development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In the past year, he has been the V.K.R.V. Rao Chair Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, India, and a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, India. From 1980 to 2004, he worked at the World Bank, where he spent extended periods in Zimbabwe and Indonesia and contributed to World Development Reports on poverty, labor, and equity and development.

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