University news

Economics experts from Glasgow University were invited to take part in a conference on Financing for Development in the United Nations in New York earlier this month.

Head of Economics, Professor Farhad Noorbakhsh and colleagues Dr Luis Angeles and Dr Céline Azémar attended the conference along with experts representing international organisations from all over the world.

The road ahead for the Monterrey process on Financing for Development* was discussed with reference to: emerging global issues in financial integration, public debt sustainability and debt management, sovereign debt restructuring, and low income countries’ access to finance.

The Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations together with Ambassadors for Norway and Egypt opened the workshop.

Participants included experts from a number of UN offices, including the Financing for Development Office (New York), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Geneva), World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations (Helsinki), an advisor to Executive Director of the IMF, the Division Chief of the Research Department of the IMF, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the President of North-South Institute (Canada), a research economist of the Bank for International Settlement (Mexico) and representatives from a number of investment banks.

Three American universities (Columbia, North Carolina and The New School, New York) and two British universities (Cambridge and Glasgow) were invited to participate.

*The event was a part of the preparatory process towards the implementation of a decision made by the General Assembly of the United Nations sixty-second Session in Monterrey that there should be a ‘follow-up international conference on financing for development to review the implementation of the Monterrey Consensus’ http://www.un.org/esa/ffd/  in Doha, Qatar, in November/December 2008.

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First published: 29 April 2008