Next Pardee Seminar (March 8): Regulating Global Capital Flows for Long-Run Development

IMPORTANT NOTE: Because of the large response, the venue for this event has been changed since the original announcement.  It will take place at the BU Metcalf Trustee Ballroom at One Silber Way, 9th Floor from 3:30 to 5 p.m.

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future will hold its next Pardee House Seminar on Thursday, March 8, 2012, from 3:30 to 5 p.m.  Titled “Regulating Global Capital Flows for Long-Run Development,” the seminar will mark the Boston University launch of a new Pardee Center Task Force Report with the same title.  The featured speakers will be Task Force co-chair Prof.  José Antonio Ocampo (Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University) and Task Force member Prof. Ilene Grabel (Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver). Pardee Faculty Fellow, Prof. Kevin Gallagher, (International Relations, BU), also a Task Force co-chair, will moderate the session.

The Pardee Center Task Force was convened at Boston University last September by the Pardee Center and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue specifically to address whether and how capital investments between developed and developing countries should be “regulated” or “managed” so that speculative capital investments in developing countries don’t disrupt the long-term development prospects for those countries.

The report includes essays by 14 leading scholars and economists who participated in the Task Force meeting and who suggest that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, some form of capital account management or regulation is both necessary and desirable. The authors examine the experience of countries that have already employed various forms of controls on capital flowing into and out of their economies, and call on international financial institutions to support the expanded use of such tools by developing countries.

The seminar will present highlights of the report by the three contributors.

Prof. José Antonio Ocampo is Director of the Economic and Political Development Program in the School of International and Public Affairs, and Fellow of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. He has held numerous positions at the United Nations and his native Colombia, including UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and Minister of Finance of Colombia. He has received many distinguished awards, including the 2008 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought and the 1988 Alejandro Angel Escobar National Science Award of Colombia. He has published extensively, and his latest books include Growth and Policy in Developing Countries: A Structuralist Approach, with Lance Taylor and Codrina Rada (2009), and Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis, edited with Stephany Griffith-Jones and Joseph E. Stiglitz (2010).

Prof. Ilene Grabel is Co-Director of the master’s program in Global Finance, Trade and Economic Integration at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. She has been a Research Scholar at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts since 2007, and was a lecturer at the Cambridge University Advanced Programme on Rethinking Development Economics since its founding. She has worked as a consultant to UNDP/International Poverty Centre, UNCTAD/G-24, UNU WIDER, and with ActionAid and the NGO coalition, “New Rules for Global Finance.” She has published widely on financial policy and crises, the political economy of international capital flows to the developing world, the relationship between financial liberalization and macroeconomic performance in developing countries, central banking, exchange rate regimes, the political economy of remittances and, most recently on the normalization of capital controls and the effect of the global financial crisis on policy space for development. Prof. Grabel is co-author (with Ha-Joon Chang) of Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Policy Manual (Zed Books, 2004). Grabel also blogs for the TripleCrisis (www.triplecrisis.com).

Prof. Kevin P. Gallagher is Associate Professor of International Relations, Boston University and a Pardee Center Faculty Fellow. He is the author of The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of Latin American Industrialization (with Roberto Porzecanski), The Enclave Economy: Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development in Mexico’s Silicon Valley (with Lyuba Zarsky), and Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond. He has been the editor or co-editor for a number of books, including Putting Development First: the Importance of Policy Space in the WTO and IFIs, and Rethinking Foreign Investment for Development: Lessons from Latin America. Prof. Gallagher is also a Research Associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. In 2009 he served on the U.S. Department of States Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy.

The Seminar will be held at the Metcalf Trustee Ballroom, One Silber Way, 9th Floor, on Thursday, March 8, 2012 from 3:30 to 5 p.m.  Please RSVP to pardee@bu.edu by Monday, March 5, 2012.