Geary Lecture 2006 "Making Globalization Work"

Venue: Burlington Hotel

The Thirty-fifth Geary lecture “Making Globalization Work” was given by Professor Joseph Stiglitz, one of the world’s best-known economists and currently Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University. He was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000 and before that he was Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and is the author of the best-selling books “Globalization and Its Discontents” and “The Roaring Nineties”. In his lecture, Professor Stiglitz addressed some of the critical problems facing our rapidly integrating world. He put forward radical new ways of dealing with the crippling indebtedness of developing countries, a new system of global reserves to overcome international financial instability, and an economically incentivised framework for dealing with the energy pollutions which create global warming and which threaten us on a planetary scale. He argued convincingly for the reform of global institutions such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank to make them truly capable of responding to the problems of our age and showed why treating developing countries more fairly is not only morally right, but, because it increases global public goods, is ultimately also to the advantage of the developed world.

The Geary lecture is organised each year by the ESRI and honours Dr R. C. Geary (1896 –1983), the first Director of the Institute, the most eminent Irish statistician and economist of the twentieth century. Previous lectures have been given by some of the world’s foremost scholars in the fields of economics, statistics and sociology, including a number of other Nobel Prize winners. More details on Joseph Stiglitz and his work can be found at at www.josephstiglitz.com