Speakers:
DINNER SPEAKER:
Trevor
Manuel,
Minister of
Finance
has been South
African Minister of
Finance since June 1996. He was born in Cape Town in January
1956 the son of an employee of the Cape Town City Council.
He was involved in the founding of the United Democratic
Front (UDF) in the Western Cape and subsequently became the
regional secretary of the UDF. Between 1985-1990 he was
repeatedly detained without trial and placed under house
arrest, spending a total of 35 months in detention.
After the unbanning of the ANC Manuel was appointed deputy
co-ordinator in the Western Cape. In 1992 Manuel became head
of the ANC’s Department of Economic Planning. After the
April 1994 elections Manuel was appointed Minister of Trade
Industry and in March 1996 he was appointed Minister of
Finance.
PLENARY
SESSION ONE
Keynote Speaker 1:
Overcoming
Government Failure in Infrastructure and Social Services.
Shanta Devarajan,
World Bank
Shantayanan Devarajan is
the Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Africa Region. Since
joining the World Bank in 1991, he has been a Principal
Economist and Research Manager for Public Economics in the
Development Research Group, the Chief Economist of the Human
Development Network, and of the South Asia Region. He was
the director of the World Development Report 2004: Making
Services Work for Poor People. Before 1991, he was on the
faculty at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government. The author and co-author of over 100
publications, Mr Devarajan’s research covers public
economics, trade policy, natural resources, and the
environment, and general equilibrium modeling of developing
countries. Born in Sri Lanka, Mr Devarajan received his B.A.
in Mathematics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in
Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Keynote Speaker 2:
Competition Law and Policy in Bad Times.
Dave Lewis,
Competition Commission
Dave
Lewis received his training in economics from the
Universities of the Witwatersrand and Cape Town.
Between 1975 and 1990 he worked in the trade union movement,
serving as General Secretary of the General Workers Union
and national organiser of the Transport and General Workers
Union.
From 1990 Lewis
directed the Development Policy Research Unit, a UCT
based research group specialising in trade and industrial
policy. Between 1994 and 1996 Lewis served as Special
Advisor to the Minister of Labour and co-chaired the
Presidential Commission on Labour Market Policy.
Lewis was a
member of the Task Team advising the Minister of Trade and
Industry on the development of competition policy and
participated in the drafting of the Competition Act.
He served as a member of the Competition Board from January
1998 and chaired the Board from January-August 1999.
With the promulgation of the Competition Act in September
1999 Lewis was appointed Chairperson of the Competition
Tribunal. He is vice-Chairman of the Steering Group of
the International Competition Network.
PLENARY SESSION
TWO
Keynote
Speaker 1:
On Experimentation.
Ravi Kanbur,
Cornell University
Ravi
Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs,
International Professor
of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of
Economics at Cornell University. He holds an appointment
tenured both in the Department of Applied Economics and
Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,
and in the Department of Economics in the College of Arts
and Sciences.
He holds a bachelor's degree in
economics from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate
in economics from the University of Oxford. He has taught at
the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Essex, Warwick,
Princeton and Columbia.
Ravi Kanbur has served on the staff of the World Bank, as
Economic Adviser, Senior Economic Adviser, Resident
Representative in Ghana, Chief Economist of the African
Region of the World Bank, and Principal Adviser to the Chief
Economist of the World Bank. He has also served as Director
of the World Bank's World Development Report.
Professor Kanbur's main areas of interest are public
economics and development economics. His work spans
conceptual, empirical, and policy analysis. He is
particularly interested in bridging the worlds of rigorous
analysis and practical policy making. His vita lists over
150 publications, covering topics such as risk taking,
inequality, poverty, structural adjustment, debt,
agriculture, and political economy. He has published in
leading economics journals such as the American Economic
Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic
Studies, Journal of Economic Theory,and Economic Journal.
Keynote Speaker 2:
To Formalise
or Not to Formalise? Comparisons of Microenterprise Data
from Southern and East Africa.
Alan Gelb,
Taye Mengistae, Vijaya Ramachandran, Manju Kedia Shah,
World Bank
Alan Gelb
is Director of
Development Policy and provides policy
advice to the Chief Economist, and guides the Development
Economics Vice Presidency's provision of research and
analytical services to the Bank's operations. Before
assuming his current position in July 2004, Alan Gelb was
the World Bank's Chief Economist for Africa. Before
that, he was staff director of the 1996 World Development
Report,
From Plan to Market, and
chief of the transition division in the Bank's policy
research department. He is a specialist on transition
economies, financial systems, macroeconomic management,
commodity prices and the economics and political economy of
oil-exporting countries. He has published several books and
scholarly articles on these and related subjects, and
co-authored Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? an
authoritative study on African development.
Vijaya
Ramachandran
is a Center for
Global Development Senior Fellow
.
Her areas of expertise are private sector development,
entrepreneurship, and foreign direct investment. She manages
CGD's corporate engagement efforts which focus on a menu of
options by which the private sector can join the fight
against global poverty and also oversees CGD's work program
on fragile states. Most recently, Vijaya's research is
focused on the analysis of enterprise survey data from
several countries sub-Saharan Africa, identifying the
constraints to doing business from the perspective of the
private sector. Prior to joining CGD, Vijaya served on the
faculty of Georgetown University, and also worked at the
World Bank, the Executive Office of the UN Secretary
General, and at Duke University. She is the author of
Investing in Africa: Strategies for Private Sector
Development (2000), co-editor with Nicolas van de Walle
and Nicole Ball of Beyond Structural Adjustment (2003), and
has written numerous articles on private sector development
in Africa. Vijaya received her PhD in Business Economics
from Harvard University in 1991.
