Final Programme - International Bar Association

Opening Ceremony
Keynote Speaker –
Professor Joseph E Stiglitz
The Nobel Prize in Economics Laureate, Professor Joseph E
Stiglitz, will be the opening ceremony keynote speaker at
this year’s IBA Annual Conference.
As former Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World
Bank between 1997 and 2000, a frequently cited expert and a
renowned leading educator in economics, Professor Stiglitz’s remarks
will provide the audience with the latest thinking on the most salient
topics of the day, including the global economy and the sovereign
debt crisis.
Professor Stiglitz’s work has focused on explaining the circumstances
in which markets do not work well, and how selective government
intervention can improve their performance. Policy analysts and
theorists alike have adopted, as standard tools, the pivotal concepts
of adverse selection and moral hazard, pioneered by the new
branch of economics which Professor Stilgitz helped to create and
which explores the consequences of information asymmetries, ‘The
Economics of Information’.
Professor Stiglitz is currently University Professor at Columbia
University in New York and co-chair of the university’s Committee
on Global Thought, as well as co-president of the Initiative for Policy
Dialogue. He has also taught at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology), Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Other
prestigious positions held by Professor Stiglitz include: Chairman
of the US Council of Economic Advisors (1995–1997); Chair of
the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance
and Social Progress, which released its report in 2009; and by
appointment of the President of the United Nations General
Assembly, Chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the
International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its
report in 2009.
Mr Stiglitz’s extensive curriculum vitae includes major contributions to
other fields in macroeconomics and monetary theory, development
economics and trade theory, public and corporate finance theory,
and also to the theories of industrial and rural organisation, welfare
economics and income and wealth distribution.
Opening Ceremony Keynote Speaker
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