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Raymond Baker to speak at presentation of 2010 African Economic Outlook

June 9th, 2010

Global Financial Integrity Director Raymond Baker will be speaking on Capitol Hill in a panel discussion on June 16 where the OECD will formally present this years’ African Economic Outlook.

Full event details below:

Wednesday, June 16, 2010
8:30 AM Registration, 9:00-10:30 AM Presentation
Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2255

While admission is free of charge, space is limited. Please register by Tuesday, June 15 2010.

Chairman:
Honorable Donald M. Payne, US House of Representatives

Presentation:
Mthuli Ncube, Chief Economist, African Development Bank
Jean-Philippe Stijns, Economist, OECD Development Center

Discussants:
Witney Schneidman, Senior Adviser, Leon H. Sullivan Foundation
Raymond Baker, Director, Global Financial Integrity

Event Description:
The OECD Development Center and the African Development Bank will present the recently released African Economic Outlook.

Produced annually by the Development Center and the African Development Bank together, for the first time this year, with the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, the African Economic Outlook (AEO) is the essential economic reference on Africa.  Now in its ninth year, the AEO presents a comprehensive analysis of economic, political and social developments on the continent. It is unique in applying a common analytical framework to the 50 countries it covers – accounting for 97% of the continent’s output and population. The AEO is the only report on Africa produced by African institutions, in partnership with international organizations.

2010 AEO In Brief
This year’s edition finds Africa’s economies weakened by the global recession and at the same time under pressure to make additional efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The world economic crisis brought a period of high growth in Africa to a sudden end. Average economic growth was slashed from an average of about 6% in 2006-2008 to 2.5% in 2009 with per capita GDP growth coming to a near standstill.

While Africa is on a path to recovery, buoyed by the strengthening of global trade and the rebound of commodity prices, there is a risk that growth remains too low to significantly reduce unemployment and poverty. It is against the backdrop that the 2010 AEO explores how public resources can be better mobilised for development through more effective, more efficient and fairer taxation. This issue is particularly important given the uncertainties about future export revenues and unstable and unpredictable inflows of Foreign Direct Investment and Official Development Aid. It includes an analysis of practices that erode the existing tax base such as the excessive granting of tax preferences, insufficient taxation of extractive industries and an inability to fight abuses of transfer pricing by multinational enterprises.

Biographies:
Congressman Donald M. Payne has represented New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District since 1988. He is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he serves as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health and as a member of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere and the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight. He has served twice as the Congressional Delegate to the United Nations, a position to which he was nominated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and appointed by President Bush. A graduate of Seton Hall University, he pursued graduate studies at Springfield College in Massachusetts. He holds honorary doctorates from Chicago State University, Drew University, Essex County College and William Paterson University.

Raymond Baker is the Director of Global Financial Integrity and the author of Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. He has for many years been an internationally respected authority on corruption, money laundering, growth, and foreign policy issues, particularly as they concern developing and transitional economies and impact upon western economic and foreign interests. Mr. Baker is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy. In 1996 he received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for a project entitled, “Flight Capital, Poverty and Free-Market Economics.” He traveled to 23 countries to interview 335 central bankers, commercial bankers, government officials, economists, lawyers, tax collectors, security officers, and sociologists on the relationships between bribery, commercial tax evasion, money laundering, and economic growth. From 1985 to 1996 Mr. Baker provided confidential economic advisory services at the presidential level for developing country governments. He holds degrees from Harvard Business School and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mthuli Ncube is Vice President and Chief Economist of the African Development Bank. A national of South Africa, he formerly served as the dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is also chair of the African Economic Research Consortium board and Founder and Chairman of Selwyn Capital Group and Barbican Holdings. He also worked for Investec Asset Management as a Portfolio Manager and Head of Asset Allocation Strategy. Earlier in his career, Mr. Ncube was a Lecturer in Finance at the London School of Economics. He is has published widely in the areas of finance and economics in the Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Banking and Finance, Mathematical Finance, Applied Financial Economics, International Journal of Auditing, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Cost Management and Journal of African Economies, among others. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and has published widely in financial economics.

Witney Schneidman is Senior Adviser at the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation and Principal of Schneidman & Associates International. During the Clinton Administration, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and, during the Obama campaign, was co-chair of the Africa Experts Group. Dr. Schneidman is a member of the Trade Advisory Committee on Africa in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Sub-Saharan African Advisory Committee at the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Corporate Council on Africa.  He is the author of the report, “A Ten Year Strategy for Increasing Capital Flows to Africa,” issued by the Commission on Capital Flows to Africa, and  Engaging Africa: Washington and the Fall of Portugal’s Colonial Empire. He has written extensively on African economic and political issues, and has served as a commentator for CNN, the BBC and NPR, among other media outlets. Mr. Schneidman received a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Southern California.

Jean-Philippe Stijns is an Economist on the Africa and Middle East Desk at the OECD Development Centre. His areas of research are natural resource economics, development macroeconomics, and international economics. He is lead policy analyst for the thematic chapter of the 2010 edition of the African Economic Outlook on “Public Resource Mobilization and Aid”. Prior to joining the Development Centre, Mr. Stijns worked a Strategist for ING Private Capital Management, the asset management arm of ING Private Banking. He has also worked as an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University where he taught Macroeconomics and International Economics to both undergraduate and graduate students; and at the CREPP at the University of Liège, a center for the study of Population and Public Economics as a research fellow. Mr. Stijns received a joint B.A.-M.A. in Economics from the University of Liège (with the Greatest Distinction), Belgium and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

For more information, contact Holly Richards, OECD Washington Center, 202-822-3873

Written by Kelley Brescia

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