Topic: Transition and euro adoption in Eastern Europe

Date: August 13, 2009

Speaker Profile :

Professor Banerjee is a graduate of the University of Delhi, India and received his doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining Haverford College, he was a senior staff member of the International Monetary Fund. He also previously taught at the University of Oxford for five years.

Details:

The major highlights of this seminar were:

• Understanding transition (communism to democracy and market-oriented economy) of the region
• Framework for analyzing this transition with its various dynamics
• Historical legacy and initial conditions of the region under discussion
• Reform and policy strategies adopted by external agencies to stimulate reforms and change
• The timing and pace of reforms initiated and monitored
• Outcomes during the transition involving Customer-Client interface and failures
• From transition to integration: joining the EU- the challenges and the future

Prof. Banerjee commenced his talk by emphasizing on understanding transition, a complete change in ideological, political, economic and social system that has passed away. He basically gave a framework for analyzing the respective transition and pointed towards the challenges in it: mainly the common elements that needed to be addressed in all transition countries. He then explained about Reform and Policy Strategies and the components of policy agenda in order to tackle macroeconomic imbalances. He further analyzed the outcomes during this transition, the reason of fall in outputs, the pattern of disinflation and lastly about the Geopolitical factor that played an important role from transition to integration.

Fundamentally Prof. Banerjee dealt with change. This change had economic, political and social influences and is of great curiosity to any manager who has to deal with so many dynamics of change and resistances in the process of creating outputs and not merely outlays.