ABOUT PRESENTERS AND AUTHORS
Keynote
Speakers
Dr. Kenichi Ohno
(GRIPS & VDF)
Dr.
Kenichi Ohno is a professor of Economics at the
National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies
(GRIPS), Tokyo and the research director of
the Vietnam Development Forum (VDF). Professor Ohno
has been working on Vietnam's development issues for
more than 10 years. He published various articles,
papers, and books on international trade, aid
management, and industrial development strategies in
developing countries. He was a recipient of Suntory
Prize for Social Sciences and Humanity, and Osagari
Jiro Award for Critical Works in 2001 for the book
Globalization of Developing Countries. He
holds a Ph.D degree in Economics from Stanford
University.
Mr. Noritaka Akamatsu
(The World Bank, Vietnam)
Mr. Akamatsu is a Lead Financial Economist of the
World Bank. He serves as Finance & Private Sector
Program Manager for Vietnam and Capital Market
Advisor for East Asia & Pacific (EAP) Region, based
in Hanoi, Vietnam. He joined the Bank in 1993 as
Financial Economist and has been specializing in the
area of financial market development. Prior to
assuming the current position, he served as a leader
of Capital Markets Group of the central anchor unit
of the Bank’s Financial Sector Network in
Washington. He has worked on numerous lending
operations, technical assistance projects including
the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) in:
Indonesia, China, Thailand, South Korea, the
Philippines, India, Russia, Romania, Turkey,
Croatia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, Peru
and others as well as Vietnam. Prior to joining the
World Bank, Mr. Akamatsu worked for Nomura Research
Institute in Tokyo and London where he was
responsible for advising governments on financial
market development, privatization and international
bond issuance. Mr. Akamatsu holds an MBA from the
University of Chicago and an MSc in Economics from
London School of Economics.
Speakers and Co-author(s)
Dr. Katsushi Imai (presenter)
Dr. Raghav Gaiha (co-author)
"Poverty, Inequality
and Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam"
Dr. Katsushi Imai is an assistant professor in
Development Economics at Department of Economics,
School of Social Sciences, and a faculty associate
of Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI), the
University of Manchester. He graduated with a MSc at
LSE and a PhD from the University of Oxford and
previously taught at Oxford and University of
London. Dr Imai has worked as a consultant for the
IFAD, the UN and DFID. He has published widely on
risk, vulnerability and poverty dynamics of
households in developing countries and on
evaluations of anti-poverty programmes, such as the
Employment Guarantee Scheme in India, in development
and economics journals, including Journal of
Development Studies, Review of Development
Economics, Oxford Development Studies, Journal of
Policy Modeling, Journal of African Economies,
among others.
Dr. Raghav Gaiha is a Professor of Public Policy,
Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi,
and currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Centre
for Population and Development Studies. He has held
visiting fellowships at Harvard, Yale, MIT,
Stanford, Penn, University of Cambridge, and the
World Bank. He has served as a Consultant with FAO,
IFAD, ADB, DFID and WIDER. His research interests
are in the areas of poverty, nutrition, infant
mortality, institutions, and natural disasters. He
has published in Economic Development and Cultural
Change, Journal of Development Economics,
Journal of Development Studies, Cambridge Journal of
Economics, Oxford Development Studies, among
others.
Dr. Wade Pfau (presenter)
Mr. Giang Thanh Long (co-author)
"Demographic Changes and the Pension Finances in
Vietnam: A Long-term Stochastic Actuarial
Assessment"
Dr. Wade Pfau is an Associate Professor of Economics
at the National Graduate Institute for Policy
Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, Japan. At GRIPS, he
teaches economics to masters and Ph.D students, who
are government officials coming to study in Japan
from throughout Asia and Africa. He earned a Ph.D
in Economics from Princeton University under the
guidance of Professors Alan Blinder and Harvey
Rosen. As an undergraduate student at the
University of Iowa, he studied economics, political
science, and history. He completed internships at
the U.S. Social Security Administration, the White
House, and the U.S. Senate. His main research
interests are related to Social Security, pensions,
and the economics of aging. Particularly, he is
working to develop methods to better analyze the
future outcomes of defined contribution pension
programs. He published a number of articles, papers,
and book chapters in National Tax Journal,
Korean Economic Review, among others.
Mr. Giang Thanh Long is a lecturer of the Faculty of
Economics, National Economics University in Hanoi,
and a research fellow at VDF-Tokyo. His main
research interests are social security, poverty,
demographic changes, and pension reform,
particularly in Vietnam. He has published various
articles and research papers on these themes. He
earned a master of public policy (MPP) degree from
Hitotsubashi University, Japan. In 2005, he held a
visiting research fellowship at the Oxford Institute
of Ageing, the University of Oxford, to work on
aging and pension reform in Vietnam.
Mr. Nguyen Trong Ha (presenter)
"The Economics of Not Using the
Health Insurance Card:
A Case Study of Vietnam"
Mr. Nguyen Trong Ha is a PhD candidate at the Crawford
School of Economics and Governance, the Australian
National University (ANU), and an on-leave lecturer of
National Economics University (NEU) in Hanoi. He earned a
Master degree in Development Economics from
Vietnam-Netherlands Master's Program in Development
Economics at NEU. His main research interests
include development economics, labor and demographic
economics. Currently, he is working on health
insurance issues in Vietnam.
Dr. Le Viet Trung (presenter)
Dr. Masayoshi Maruyama (co-author)
"The Revolution of Vietnamese
Distribution System"
Dr. Le Viet Trung received a PhD degree from the
Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe
University, where he is currently conducting research under a
postdoctoral fellowship from the Japanese Society
for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He has
published a variety of articles and papers in
refereed journals on the Vietnamese distribution
system and consumer behaviors.
Dr. Masayoshi Maruyama is a professor of Business
Economics at the Graduate School of Business
Administration, Kobe University, Japan. He is
specialized in the area of industrial organization,
marketing, and distribution systems. He has
published a number of articles, papers, and books on
these fields. For Vietnam, he has made a great
contribution to the Vietnamese distribution system
via both empirical and academic research activities,
in which several research projects have been
conducted and their reports have been published in
refereed journals.