IDC 2010 - Panel speaker bios

SAT, 4/10, 2:40 - 4:00 PM. Location: TBD

In an era in which the role of governments in economy is consistently shrinking, it is the development of private sector that really matters for the integration of developing countries into the global economy. In this panel, the success of several modes (e.g. privatization, PPP, microfinance etc.) to develop the private sector in poor countries and the lessons for the future will be discussed.

Biographies

Nilgun Gokgur is an Independent Development Economist and Associate at Boston Institute for Developing Economies (BIDE). She works on state-owned enterprise reforms, enterprise restructuring, privatization and private sector participation as it relates to electric power, telecommunications, transport, water supply and wastewater, mining and banking. She is known for her assessment of the economic and social impact of several privatization programs on consumers, workers and employees, the enterprises themselves and the government. She has also worked on international trade, role of foreign and domestic investments; expansion of non-traditional high value-added manufacturing and service sector exports; micro, small and medium enterprise development; export processing zones, small-large firm linkages; cluster-based analysis and cluster-based policy reforms for achieving productivity growth and international competitiveness. She has conducted assignments in 30 countries in the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, The Eastern Europe and Asia for the World Bank, the European Union, the Asian Development Bank, USAID and DfID.

Prior to BIDE, she worked as a Research Associate at the Harvard Business School and before that at the former Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). She holds an M.P.A in development economics from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and an M.A. and B.A. in economics from the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Nomaan Mirza is a Senior Investment Officer at the International Finance Corporation, where he has worked on investments and advisory services in a wide range of countries and industries. Since March 2008, he has been on an extended assignment as a special assistant to the president of the World Bank Group. He has previously worked at SOFTBANK Emerging Markets, a venture capital firm focusing on information technology investments in developing countries, and at the Emerging Markets Partnership, an international private equity firm focusing on infrastructure investments. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and Bachelor's degrees in Economics and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.