Good afternoon and thank you very much for coming. I would like to thank the Banks Association of Turkey for their generous sponsorship of this occasion. The Per Jacobsson Foundation has been a feature of World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings for about 20 years now. I have had the pleasure as its Chairman to introduce a wide number of very distinguished speakers.
Today, it is my great pleasure to introduce somebody who clearly needs no introduction in this city and probably most cities in the world, Kemal Derviş. Kemal and I have been friends and colleagues for more than 30 years now, and it has been a great pleasure for me to watch his career progress from his beginnings at the World Bank and the distinct contribution he made there to policy analysis and recommendations for many countries.
Subsequently, as is well known, Kemal became the Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in this country and contributed very significantly to the economic policies that have helped revive the Turkish economy and stabilized it in the years during his stewardship of the economy.
He subsequently became Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, and he’s now at the Brookings Institution and also Overseer on the Board of Sabanci University.
There are many other things I could say about Kemal, but I don’t want to detract from the time available for his speech. So without further ado, let me ask Kemal to give us his lecture.