This first executive breakfast in a three-part series highlights Korea’s attractiveness as a regional hub for economic dialogue, investment, and innovation. The session explores both the mechanics and the attendant opportunities of bringing the world to Korea for the G20 summit. The event will feature a call-in by Colin Bradford, a leading voice on the “new dynamics of summitry” and innovations for the G20 summit, and will also provide an opportunity for discussion among corporate and policy observers. Henry Seggerman of International Investment Advisers and the Korea International Investment Fund will provide concluding comments from Asia. The event will be facilitated by Stephen Noerper, Senior Vice President of The Korea Society.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

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Colin Bradford is a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development, at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Governance Innovation. A former chief economist at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bradford focuses on global economic governance, environmental governance, and international economics and development.

Colin has been a leading figure in mobilizing professional opinion and policy attention on the importance of the G20. In 1998, he had written a paper on “Chronic Instability in the World Economy” in which he noted the need for an enlarged summit grouping. In 2003, he went to Brookings to write a book on moving the G8 to the G20. In 2007, he and Johnannes Linn edited a Brookings conference volume on Global Governance Reform: Breaking the Stalemate. In the mid-1990s, he was a leader in articulating the need for a post-cold war vision for development cooperation by developing the International Development Goals (IDGs) in the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and in promoting a consensus around them. In 2003, he played a pivotal role in transforming the IDGs and the Millennium Declaration goals into a single vision which we know today as the Millennium Development Goals.  He was an adviser to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Helsinki Process on the MDGs in the 2000s.

In the 1980s, while at Yale, Dr. Bradford played a key role in the international debate regarding the East Asian Miracles, in a multitude of research papers, conference essays, and technical papers, arguing that the conventional wisdom of mainstream economics on trade liberalization and export-led growth was less convincing than a focus on internal dynamism generating growth-led exports in Korea and other “newly industrializing countries.” Dr. Bradford has focused his professional life as an international economist on the relationship of developing countries to the world economy, serving ten years in the U.S. government, eight years in international institutions, and sixteen years in universities, teaching at Yale for ten years, American University for six years, and intermittently at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins SAIS. He was a presidential appointee in the Clinton administration where he was chief economist of USAID, a political appointee in the Carter administration where he was head of the office of multilateral development banks in the U.S. Treasury, and a legislative assistant for U.S. Senator Lawton Chiles (D-Florida). He held senior economic policy positions in the OECD in Paris, the World Bank and the Inter-American Committee for the Alliance for Progress. He holds a B.A. in Hiistory from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia.

Henry Seggerman is manager of the Korea International Investment Fund (KIIF), the oldest hedge fund invested in South Korea’s stock market. From its launch in 1992 to February, 2010, KIIF has outperformed Korea’s KOSPI index by an unrivalled 374 percent, rising 22 percent per year on average.

Dr. Stephen Noerper is Senior VP at The Korea Society. Prior, he was a professor at New York University, an academy president, corporate vice president and U.S. State Department analyst.