You are hereThe Global Economic Crisis: from North to South
The Global Economic Crisis: from North to South
Venezuelan scholar-diplomat Escalona discusses crisis w/ a stellar panel of economists
Friday, June 12, 2009, 7:00 p.m. Venezuela's Adjunct Ambassador to the United Nations and economist Julio Escalona returns to e5 to address the global economic crisis and preview the upcoming UN Assembly's Special Session on the crisis. Joining the conversation are Richard Freeman (Harvard's National Bureau of Economic Research), Julie Matthaei (Wellesley College) and Arthur MacEwan (UMass Boston).
Program details to follow. See attachments below for the flyer and details of the UN conference; click to read the speaker bios.
Biographies
Julio Escalona H.E. Ambassador Julio Escalona is Venezuela's Alternate Permanent Representative at the United Nations in New York. He holds degrees in economics, geopolitics and environmental issues, and is a former director of the School of Economics at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) in Caracas and head of its department of human development. He is a professor of economics, general economic history, economic education in Latin America, contemporary Marxism and contemporary social problems. He has coordinated research seminars on economic integration, local economies and local development, and alternative technologies and has been a participant and guest lecturer at seminars, forums, academic institutions in Peru, Brazil, Japan, France, Mexico and Venezuela.
Richard Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University. He is currently serving as Faculty Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School. He is also director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Senior Research Fellow in Labour Markets at the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance, and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Professor Freeman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of Sigma Xi.
He has served on five panels of the National Academy of Sciences, including the Committee on National Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Scientists. He has published over 300 articles dealing with a wide range of research interests including the job market for scientists and engineers; the growth and decline of unions; the effects of immigration and trade on inequality; restructuring European welfare states; Chinese labor markets; transitional economies; youth labor market problems; crime; self-organizing non-unions in the labor market; employee involvement programs; and income distribution and equity in the marketplace. He is currently directing the NBER / Sloan Science Engineering Workforce Project (with Daniel Goroff).
In addition, he has written or edited over 35 books, several of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.
Some of his books include: America Works: The Exceptional Labor Market (2007),
Inequality Around the World - IEA Conference Volume #134 (2002), Youth Employment and Joblessness in Advanced Countries (2000), The New Inequality: Creating Solutions for Poor America (New Democracy Forum Series) (1999), Generating Jobs: How to Increase Demand for Less-Skilled Workers (1998), The Welfare State in Transition: Reforming the Swedish Model (1997), Differences and Changes in Wage Structures (1995), Working Under Different Rules (1994), Small Differences that Matter: Labor Markets and Income Maintenance in Canada and the United States (1993), Immigration and the Work Force: Economic Consequences for the United States and Source Areas (1992), Immigration, Trade and the Labor Market (1991), Labor Markets in Action: Essays in Empirical Economics (1989), Public Sector Unionism in the U.S. (1987), The Black Youth Employment Crisis (1986), (1984), The Youth Joblessness Problem (1981), Labor Economics (1979), and The Overeducated American (1976).
Julie Matthaei has been active in anti-war, feminist, ecology, lesbian/gay, and anti-racist movement in the U.S. since she went to college at Stanford in 1969, and is a big fan of (and participant in) the Social Forum movement. She has been teaching economics – including Feminist Economics – at Wellesley College for 30 years. Julie has written two books on gender in U.S. economic history, An Economic History of Women in America (1982) and, with Teresa Amott, Race, Gender and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the U.S. (1996), and has been researching and writing about feminist economic transformation with Barbara Brandt for the past seven years.
With Carl Davidson and Jenna Allard, she is a co-editor of, Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet. Julie was a member of the Working Group for the US Social Forum, which planned the caucuses and sessions which are documented in this book, and is currently a member of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network Coordinating Committee. Her 2001 article, "Healing ourselves, healing our economy: paid work, unpaid work, and the next stage of feminist economic transformation" is particularly important in light of today's crisis.
Arthur MacEwan has been a member of the faculty of the UMass Economics Department since 1975, teaching courses on economic development, macroeconomics, the economics of education, Latin America, American Economic History and Marxist economics. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for Social Policy at UMass Boston. His writing focuses primarily on issues of international development, but his current research also focuses on the economics of education. His most recent book is NEOLIBERALISM OR DEMOCRACY? Economic Strategy, Markets and Alternatives for the 21st Century, published by Zed Books (London) in 1999. In addition to his scholarly work, Professor MacEwan writes regularly for Dollars & Sense magazine and is authors its "Doctor Dollar" column. "Inequality, Power and Ideology" is the most recent essay. Another recent essay speaks to our present topic, "How Did the West Get Rich?" During 2001-2002 Professor MacEwan was the university's Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and throughout the 1990s he was the Vice President and Grievance Officer for the Faculty Staff Union at UMass Boston.
