Biographical note

David Begg is Principal of the Tanaka Business School at Imperial College London. He has been a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (a network of leading European economists) since its inception in 1984. David's research focuses mainly on monetary policy, exchange rates, monetary union, and economic transition. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He co-authored several of the CEPR annual reports in the series he helped found: Monitoring the European Central Bank, and Monitoring European Integration. The 1997 MEI Report, EMU: Getting the Endgame Right, changed the policy that the European Union adopted to launch the euro in 1999. He was also founding Managing Editor of Economic Policy, now an official journal of the European Economic Association. Gianluigi Vernasca a Senior Lecturer of Economics at University of Essex. STANLEY FISCHER is governor of the Bank of Israel. Previously he was vice chairman of Citigroup and president of Citigroup International, and from 1994 to 2002 he was first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. He was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and has a PhD from MIT. He taught at the University of Chicago while Rudi Dornbusch was a student there, starting a long friendship and collaboration. He was a member of the faculty of the MIT Economics Department from 1973 to 1998. From 1988 to 1990 he was chief economist at the World Bank. His main research interests are economic growth and development; international economics and macroeconomics, particularly inflation and its stabilization; and the economics of transition. http://www.iie.com/fischer RUDI DORNBUSCH (19422002) was Ford Professor of Economics and International Management at MIT. He did his undergraduate work in Switzerland and held a PhD from the University of Chicago. He taught at Chicago, at Rochester, and from 1975 to 2002 at MIT. His research was primarily in international economics, with a major macroeconomic component. His special research interests included the behavior of exchange rates, high inflation and hyperinflation, and the problems and opportunities that high capital mobility pose for developing economies. He lectured extensively in Europe and in Latin America, where he took an active interest in problems of stabilization policy, and held visiting appointments in Brazil and Argentina. His writing includes Open Economy Macroeconomics and, with Stanley Fischer and Richard Schmalensee, Economics.