Date:
To watch the recording, click here.
Speakers: Maria Antonieta Alva, Minister of Economy & Finance, Peru; Eduardo Engel, Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Chile
Moderated by: Gordon Hanson, Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Latin America has become an epicenter of COVID-19 despite government taking strong containment actions very early. Join us for a discussion with Maria Antonieta Alva, Minister of Economy and Finance for Peru, and Eduardo Engel, Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Chile. Alva has been leading the efforts by the government of Peru to contain the economic and social impacts of COVID-19 while Engel has been very involved in measuring the progress of COVID-19 in Chile, leading new approaches for tracking deaths and cases.
María Antonieta Alva Luperdi is Peruvian public administrator who has been the Minister of Economy and Finance since October 2019. Alva previously served at various departments in the Peruvian government, mainly the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Ministry of Education. She pursued her undergraduate studies at the Universidad del Pacífico, where she served as president of the Student Center. She was general director (2005 to 2007) of the civil association Coherencia, an intercollegiate political organization. She graduated in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in Economics. Alva later completed the Master's in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Alva has been leading the efforts by the government in Peru to contain the economic and social impacts of COVID-19.
Eduardo Engel is the former President and current board member of the think tank Espacio Público and Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Chile. Engel graduated from Engineering at the University of Chile in 1980. He then received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University in 1987 and later a second Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1991. After graduating from MIT, Engel accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (1992-1994), before returning to Chile as Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Chile. In 2001 Engel joined Yale University faculty as Professor of Economics, where he spent eleven years (until 2012). He returned to Chile in 2012 to work as a Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Chile. He chaired the Presidential Advisory Council on Conflicts of Interest, Influence Peddling, and Corruption – also known as the Engel Commission – in 2015. Engel has been very involved in measuring the progress of COVID-19 in Chile, leading new approaches for tracking deaths and cases.
Gordon Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Hanson received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1992 and his B.A. in economics from Occidental College in 1986. Prior to joining Harvard in 2020, he held the Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations at UC San Diego, where he was founding director of the Center on Global Transformation. Hanson previously served on the economics faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas. In his scholarship, Hanson specializes in international trade, international migration and economic geography. He has published extensively in top economics journals, is widely cited for his research by scholars from across the social sciences and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Hanson’s current research addresses how globalization in the form of immigration and expanded trade with China have affected U.S. local labor markets. In a new endeavor, he is working with a multidisciplinary team of scholars to use satellite imagery to assess the impacts of expanding transportation networks, exposure to extreme weather, and related events on urban economic activity.
Presented in collaboration with Center for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School