Speaker
Dr. Graciana del Castillo
Associate Director and Research Scholar
Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University
Dr. Graciana del Castillo is an expert in countries in crisis-both in emerging economies experimenting financial, banking or fiscal crises and in countries coming out of war and embarking on economic reconstruction. She focused on these countries when she was the first senior economist in the Cabinet of the UN Secretary-General in the early 1990’s and continued working in countries in crises, particularly in Latin America, when she joined the IMF. She was a director for sovereign ratings at S&P’s, a senior consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank; a visiting scholar at the OECD Development Center; and an advisor to the private sector, including international banks, on Latin America. She has also been a participant in USAID bids for reconstruction projects in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has participated in projects with the Asian Development Bank and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. She is a founding partner of the Macroeconomic Advisory Group and a Director in the Centennial Group Latin America. With a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University (1986), she has been Adjunct Professor there since 1990. She is now Associate Director and Research Scholar of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University which directs Professor Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics. Over the years she has worked on business climate and other issues which affect investment and is now working on how to reactivate dynamism and inclusion amidst the global financial crisis. Her articles have appeared in top economic and political journals, including Foreign Policy, Global Governance, World Development, and the Journal of International Money and Finance. Her press articles have appeared, often more than once, in over 50 of the leading newspapers worldwide in more than a dozen languages. Her book on Rebuilding War-Torn State: The Challenge of Post-Conflict Economic Reconstruction was published by Oxford University Press in November 2008.
