José Antonio Ocampo (Banco de la República, Colombia & Columbia University)

Inaugural SOAS Central Banking Lecture: Essential Reforms for a Sound 21st Century International Monetary System.

The inaugural SOAS Central Banking Lecture will be delivered by Professor José Antonio Ocampo. The SOAS Central Banking Lectures have been established by the SOAS Department of Economics to provide a forum for distinguished scholars and practitioners to address topics of broad interest in the areas of central banking and international monetary and financial policy. The lecture will scrutinise the need for and the challenges of reforming the international monetary system. The 2007-09 global financial crisis, as the emerging market crises of the late twentieth century, show that the ad hoc international monetary system that evolved out of the crisis of the Bretton Woods arrangements in the early 1970s needs fundamental reforms. This lecture, based on José Antonio Ocampo’s recent book, Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System, will analyse the areas in need of fundamental reform: the global reserve system, macroeconomic policy cooperation, prevention and management of balance of payments crises, and governance of the system. Professor Ocampo’s lecture will be followed by comments by Stephany Griffith-Jones (Columbia University) and Ulrich Volz (SOAS).

Spearker biography:

José Antonio Ocampo is Member of the Board of Banco de la República, Colombia’s central bank, and Chair of the Committee for Development Policy of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). He is also Professor (on leave) at the School of International and Public Affairs, co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue and Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. He has occupied 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, Minister of Agriculture and Director of the National Planning Office of Colombia. He has received numerous academic distinctions, including the 2012 Jaume Vicens Vives award of the Spanish Association of Economic History for the best book on Spanish or Latin American economic history, 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 on macroeconomic theory and policy, international financial issues, economic and social development, international trade, and Colombian and Latin American economic history.

Speakers: José Antonio Ocampo (Banco de la República, Colombia & Columbia University), Stephany Griffith-Jones (Columbia University) and Ulrich Volz (SOAS).

Released by: SOAS Economics Podcasts