Influential thinkers in the fields of international economics, history and digital technology are set to speak on global economic trends that will shape the world’s future in a run-up to the 51st Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila in May, the Department of Finance (DOF) announced last Sunday.
The DOF said historian Peter Frankopan and economist Paola Subacchi will be among the key speakers at the May 4 forum hosted by the Philippines, which will also include Dr. Naoyuki Yoshino, dean of the ADB Institute, as one of the panelists.
Frankopan is a professor of global history at Oxford University, while Subacchi is an expert on international financial and monetary systems and is the former director of International Economics Research at Chatham House.
The 51st ADB Annual Meeting, to be held from May 3 to 6 at the ADB headquarters in Mandaluyong City, will be attended by the finance and development ministers and central bank governors of the ADB’s 67 member-economies, of which 48 are from the Asia-Pacific region.
Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III, who is this year’s chairman of the ADB Board of Governors, said some 3,000 representatives from the bank’s development partners, private sector and civil society organizations, media and the academe are expected to take part in the four-day event in Manila.
This year’s annual meeting, with the theme “Linking People and Economies for Inclusive Development,” will be preceded by a series of conferences meant to examine the changing global and regional realities and challenges and, more important, determine how the bank can play an “even more effective role” in helping attain inclusive growth for the poorest communities in its member-economies, Dominguez said.
The finance chief said the slew of discussions in the upcoming ADB annual meeting on inclusive growth are in sync with the Duterte administration’s strategy on economic inclusion, which is through massive investments in infrastructure projects that will link communities to the mainstream of wealth creation, and higher spending on social services such as health care and education to liberate millions from poverty at the soonest possible time.
He said the Philippines’s hosting of the ADB Annual Meeting is “fortuitous” for the country, as it will provide the government the opportunity to set the spotlight on the domestic economy’s strong growth, and its reform agenda to sustain and make it inclusive by improving living standards and dramatically bringing down the poverty rate by 2022.
Before this year’s event, 15 previous annual meetings were also held in Manila, with the most recent one in 2012 and an earlier small-scale meeting in 2003.
Headquartered in Manila and established in 1966, the ADB is dedicated to reducing poverty in Asia and the Pacific through inclusive economic growth, environmentally sustainable growth, and regional integration.