Speaker:

Ozlem Arpac Arconian

The Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies

presents

"Sovereign Wealth Funds for Development in Africa"

 

Ozlem Arpac Arconian

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

Orfalea Center Visiting Research Scholar

 

Thursday, May 8, 2014 -- 12:00 NOON

 

Orfalea Center Seminar Room -- 1005 Robertson Gym

 

Sovereign wealth funds (SWF) are increasingly becoming popular in Africa as the continent seeks alternative ways to manage resource revenues to boost economic growth and promote economic development. While SWFs are primarily used to cushion against commodity price volatilities, they are also seen as an escape from the so-called resource curse in a region where discoveries of valuable commodities ignite conflict and corruption. In addition, recently established SWFs in Africa have a development mandate. The objective of this research is to improve our understanding of SWF activities in Africa and to discuss the potential role that SWFs could play in African economies. It offers a political economy analysis of SWFs using agency theory. Case studies of Singapore and the GCC countries confirm that SWFs can have significant development impact, but are also prone to political influence.

 

SPEAKER

 Ozlem Arpac Arconian is Lecturer in Economics, September 2009 to date in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Surrey (2007) with a dissertation titled "The Implementation of IMF-supported Programmes: An Empirical Investigation Using Complementary Methodologies." Her fields of specialization include international finance and development, the effectiveness of IMF and World Bank assisted programs, the political economy of reform in developing countries, and discrete choice econometrics, with teaching interests in macroeconomics, development economics, and applied econometrics. Recent research work has involved a comparative political economy study of Turkey and Greece in the context of economic crises and corruption, including research on Turkey's graduation from the IMF and the country's transitioning from dominance of the Washington Consensus toward what might be called 'Istanbul Decisions'.

 

Dr. Arconian has been an external reviewer (2010-2011) for the Systematic Review Program, Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK, and for the Open Window Grant Program of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). She has served as an economist in Emerging Markets Research at the Dresdner Kleinwort Investment Bank, London (2007-2009) responsible for coordinating emerging markets reference databases and developing models of relevance to emerging markets macroeconomics, and producing high frequency research on emerging market economies including Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, with a particular emphasis on Turkey. In 2006 she worked as Economist for the International Monetary Fund, in Washington D.C. in the Fund Internship Program, Independent Evaluation Office.