Andres Velasco seminar: “The Fiscal Framework: Lessons from Chile”

The Policy Institute and the Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS) at TCD are pleased to announce that Andres Velasco (ex Minister of Finance for Chile) will give a seminar at TCD on Monday March 14 on “The Fiscal Framework: Lessons from Chile”.  As has been flagged on this blog before, Chile was able to run very sizeable surpluses in the pre-crisis period, such that it could enjoy a big fiscal swing during the crisis without threatening fiscal sustainability.  This seminar provides an opportunity to learn how Chile was able to achieve this counter-cyclical fiscal policy.

  • Monday, March  14
  • Time: 8.30am-10am
  • Venue:  Jonathan Swift Theatre (Room 2041A), Arts Block, TCD
  • Admission: Free, All welcome
  • Queries to: policy.institute at tcd.ie

Andrés Velasco: Short Bio

Andrés Velasco was the Minister of Finance of Chile between March 2006 and March 2010. During his tenure he was recognized as Latin American Finance Minister of the Year by several international publications. His work to save Chile´s copper windfall and create a rainy-day fund was highlighted in the Financial Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, among many others.

Mr. Velasco is currently a Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral fellow in political economy at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received an B.A. in economics and philosophy and an M.A. in international relations from Yale University.

Pior to entering government, Mr. Velasco was Sumitomo-FASID Professor of Development and International Finance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, an appointment he had held since 2000. Earlier he was Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University and Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

Mr. Velasco was a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an International Research Fellow at the Kiel Institute for World Economics in Kiel, Germany, and the President of Expansiva, a think-tank in Santiago, Chile. He has been a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and ECLAC.

He was president of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) from 2005 to 2007. In February 2006 he received the Award for Excellence in Research granted by the Inter-American Development Bank.

In addition to ninety academic papers and three academic books, he has published two works of fiction in Spanish: Vox Populi (Editorial Sudamericana, 1995) and Lugares Comunes (Editorial Planeta, 2003).