Akbar Noman is at Columbia University, where he combines being a senior fellow at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) with teaching as an adjunct at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is co-chair of IPD’s Africa Task Force. Professor Noman’s numerous publications include “Strategies for African Development” (jointly with Joseph Stiglitz) in Good Growth and Governance in Africa: Rethinking Development Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2012). He has wide-ranging experience of policy analysis and formulation in a variety of developing and transition economies, having worked extensively for the World Bank, as well as at the IMF and other international organizations and at senior levels of government. His other academic appointments have been at Oxford University (where he was also a student) and the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is university professor at Columbia University, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, and a lead author of the 1995 IPCC report, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. Stiglitz received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded annually to the American economist under forty who has made the most significant contribution to the subject. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University, held the Drummond Professorship at All Souls College Oxford, and has also taught at MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. He is the author most recently of The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012). In 2011, Time named him one of the world’s one hundred most influential people.