London School of Economics: Public lectures and events

Speaker(s): Dr Duvvuri Subbarao | This lecture is in honour of Dr Indraprastha Gordhanbhai (IG) Patel who was the ninth director of LSE from 1984 to 1990.Over the five years through 2003-08 leading up to the global financial crisis, India clocked an average annual growth of 8.7 per cent on the back of wide ranging structural and policy reforms and growing integration with the global economy. By the year 2008, India was the fourth largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. For a nation that once believed that the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ was its destiny, this remarkable growth performance became a trigger for setting off aspirations for double-digit growth.Those aspirations have moderated significantly with growth moderating below trend in the post-crisis period owing to the impact of the global downturn as also a host of domestic policy and operational bottlenecks. The post-crisis period has also been characterized by a large fiscal deficit, historically high current account deficit and inflation persisting above the comfort level. Macroeconomic management during this period has had to contend with balancing between stimulating growth and reining in inflation, dealing with the short-term pressures in external sector without compromising long-term sustainability and returning to a path of fiscal responsibility.Dr Subbarao, governor of the Reserve Bank of India will reflect on these challenges from the Reserve Bank perspective and illustrate the dilemmas encountered in making policy choices.Dr Duvvuri Subbarao assumed office as the twenty-second governor of the Reserve Bank of India on 5 September 2008. Prior to this appointment, Dr Subbarao served as finance secretary to the Government of India from April 2007 to September 2008 and as secretary to the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council from March 2005 to March 2007, and was a lead economist in the World Bank (1999 - 2004). Dr Subbarao came into the Reserve Bank just a week before the global financial crisis erupted in full in mid-September 2008. He led the Reserve Bank’s effort to mitigate the impact of the crisis on India and was actively engaged in the G-20 effort to coordinate an international response to the crisis.

Speaker(s): Professor Jeffrey D Sachs | The world has agreed to adopt Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide global development after 2015. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will discuss the choice of SDGs and a policy and normative framework to achieve them.Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 80 countries. He has twice been named among Time magazine's 100 most influential world leaders. He was called by the New York Times, "probably the most important economist in the world," and by Time magazine "the world's best known economist." A recent survey by The Economist magazine ranked Professor Sachs as among the world's three most influential living economists of the past decade.Professor Sachs serves as the director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and professor of health policy and management at Columbia University. He is special advisor to United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. He is co-founder and chief strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).

Speaker(s): Professor Anne Applebaum | The nations of the region we called “Eastern Europe” were once closely linked, so much so that West Europeans had trouble distinguishing them. But since 1989 they have made different choices and taken different paths. Are there lessons which can be learned from the East European experience of reform? Professor Anne Applebaum is the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs for the 2012-2013 academic year.

Speaker(s): Professor A. John Simmons | Modern states claim a wide variety of rights of control over particular geographical territories. These claims, however, are regularly disputed, often leading to violence. This fact makes practically pressing the questions, to be explored in these lectures, of how and to what extent such territorial claims by states can be justified. A. John Simmons (Ph.D., Cornell) is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy, and professor of Law; editor, Philosophy and Public Affairs; Editorial Board member, Social Theory and Practice. He specialises in political philosophy, ethics, history of moral and political theory, and philosophy of law. This is the second in a series of two lectures by Professor Simmons, the first, States and their Territories: Boundaries of Authority, takes place on Monday 11 March.

Speaker(s): Hugh Segal | Senator Hugh Segal, Canada's Special Envoy to the Commonwealth, will speak about Commonwealth reform and the role it can play in helping its members strengthen Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law.Senator Hugh Segal was appointed Canada's Special Envoy to the Commonwealth in 2011. This followed upon his service as a member of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group (2010-2011) which produced 106 recommendations for Commonwealth renewal for the 21st century.Senator Segal is a former Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and he now chairs the Anti-Terrorism Committee of the Senate. He is a former president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, chief of staff to a Prime Minister of Canada and Associate Cabinet Secretary in Ontario.

Speaker(s): Stuart Basten, Carlos Cavalle, Wolfgang Lutz, Catherine Hakim, John Parker, Eric Kaufmann | This panel explores the impact of declining fertility in western countries and East Asia - especially the social effects which have largely been ignored. The panel will also launch the publication of a new book, Whither the Child: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility (Paradigm Publishers 2013). Stuart Basten is ESRC Fellow in Demography and Social Policy at Oxford University. Carlos Cavalle is the Director, Social Trends Institute. Wolfgang Lutz is Professor, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Catherine Hakim is Professor, Centre for Policy Studies. John Parker is the Globalisation Editor, Economist Magazine. Eric Kaufmann is Professor, Birkbeck, University of London.

Speaker(s): Professor Roland Dannreuther | When there are shifts in distribution of power in international politics, energy security emerges as a salient concern. Professor Dannreuther will consider the implications of two shifts: first, the flow of energy from east to west (oil and gas) and the increasing links between Asia and energy-producing regions; and secondly, the flow from consumers of energy to producers of energy with the rise of resource nationalism. Professor Dannreuther joined the University of Westminster in September 2009 as head of the Department of Politics and International Relations and Professor of International Relations. He is also an International Fellow at the Department of International Relations, Tbilisi State University, Georgia.

Speaker(s): Professor Etienne Balibar | Etienne Balibar is Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and emeritus professor of moral and political philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre.

Speaker(s): Professor Clare Hemmings | This paper charts the significance of Emma Goldman's revolutionary thought for a contemporary analysis of sexuality, gender and revolt. Throughout her life (1869-1940) and work Goldman centred sexuality as both key to how capitalism functions (particularly for women) and as a privileged site for political transformation. Connecting sexuality to labour, Goldman's analyses of reproduction, prostitution, homosexuality and free love provide a helpful challenge to contemporary feminist investments in materialist and cultural analyses as opposed, and open up the possibility of an alternative feminist history with sexual materialism at its heart. But in claiming Goldman's thinking for a post-Marxist queer and feminist politics, what do we need to ignore in her thought? What does serious consideration of the sexual (but not gendered) essentialism that grounds Goldman's thought do to a contemporary vision of feminist transformation? Drawing on primary materials and a creative re-reading of archival fragments, I suggest that Goldman's sexual politics allows for a reinvigorated feminist method (as well as politics) with a real connection to others at its heart. Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory and has been working at LSE for 13 years. Her primary areas of research interest are feminist theory and sexuality studies, and her main publications in these spheres are Bisexual Spaces (Routledge 2002) and Why Stories Matter (2011), for which she won the 2012 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Prize.

Speaker(s): Professor A. John Simmons | Modern states claim a wide variety of rights of control over particular geographical territories. These claims, however, are regularly disputed, often leading to violence. This fact makes practically pressing the questions, to be explored in these lectures, of how and to what extent such territorial claims by states can be justified.A. John Simmons (Ph.D., Cornell) is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy, and professor of Law; editor, Philosophy and Public Affairs; Editorial Board member, Social Theory and Practice. He specialises in political philosophy, ethics, history of moral and political theory, and philosophy of law.

Speaker(s): Dr Jon Danielsson, Professor Charles Goodhart, Matt King | The first public event of the ESRC Systemic Risk Centre at LSE will debate whether the post crisis reforms of financial regulations will be effective in protecting us from financial excesses, or may perversely destabilise the financial system. The panel of experts will debate the topic and take questions from the audience.Jon Danielsson is the director of the Systemic Risk Centre at LSE. His research interests include financial stability, systemic risk, extreme market movements, market liquidity and financial crisis. He has published his research extensively in both academic journals and the mainstream media, and has presented his work at a number of universities and institutions.Charles Goodhart is emeritus professor of Banking and Finance with the Financial Markets Group at LSE, having previously, 1987-2005, been its deputy director. Until his retirement in 2002, he had been the Norman Sosnow Professor of Banking and Finance at LSE since 1985. Before then, he had worked at the Bank of England for seventeen years as a monetary adviser, becoming a chief adviser in 1980. In 1997 he was appointed one of the outside independent members of the Bank of England's new Monetary Policy Committee until May 2000. Earlier he had taught at Cambridge and LSE. Besides numerous articles, he has written a couple of books on monetary history; a graduate monetary textbook, Money, Information and Uncertainty (2nd Ed. 1989); two collections of papers on monetary policy, Monetary Theory and Practice (1984) and The Central Bank and The Financial System (1995); and a number of books and articles on Financial Stability, on which subject he was adviser to the Governor of the Bank of England, 2002-2004, and numerous other studies relating to financial markets and to monetary policy and history. His latest books include The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: A History of the Early Years, 1974-1997, (2011), and The Regulatory Response to the Financial Crisis, (2009).Matt King is managing director and global head of Credit Products Strategy at Citi. His team is responsible for forming views and advising clients on the full spectrum of credit, across high grade, high yield, leveraged loan, structured, emerging and municipal bond markets. While the majority of clients are investors, he also deals frequently with issuers and regulators on everything from market direction to valuation to risk management. Matt King is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has published extensively on credit markets over the past two decades. Some of his most widely referenced pieces include Are the brokers broken? (published two weeks before Lehman’s bankruptcy), Buy the bubbles, sell the bath, and How much debt is too much debt? Prior to joining Citi in 2003, Mr King was head of European Credit Strategy at JPMorgan. He is British, and a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he read Social & Political Sciences.

Speaker(s): Chris Brown | LSE London's 2013 Lent term seminar series begins on the 14th of January. Speakers from within and beyond academia will focus on many of the implications of the current economic and political environment for London, covering relevant issues such as the road pricing, UK trends in higher education, census data and localism. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields.

Speaker(s): Enda Kenny | Enda Kenny is Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, a position he has held since March 2011. He has been the Leader of Fine Gael since June 2002 and has represented the people of Mayo as a Fine Gael member of Dáil Éireann since 1975. He served as Minister for Tourism and Trade from 1994 - 1997. He was also Vice-President of the European People’s Party from 2006-2012.

Speaker(s): Dr Ama de Graft Aikins, Dr Gora Mboup, Professor Vanessa Watson | Notwithstanding improvements, urban health in Africa remains a particular challenge, with 70 per cent of urban dwellers living in informal settlements, facing multiple disease burdens. How might we move towards healthy African cities?Ama de Graft Aikins is a visiting fellow at LSE Health and senior lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana.Gora Mboup is a senior demographic and health expert and the chief of the Global Urban Observatory of UN-HABITAT.Vanessa Watson is professor and deputy dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Cape Town.

Speaker(s): Louise de Sousa, Elda Moreno, Pragna Patel | The Istanbul Convention is the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. It is the first legally binding instrument in Europe and in terms of scope the most advanced treaty in the world creating a comprehensive legal framework to prevent violence, to protect victims and to end the impunity of perpetrators. It defines and criminalises various forms of violence against women (including forced marriage, female genital mutilation, stalking, physical and psychological violence and sexual violence). It also foresees the establishment of an international group of independent experts to monitor its implementation at national level. Louise de Sousa is Head of Human Rights and Democracy Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Elda Moreno is Head of Gender Equality and Human Dignity Department and Directorate General of Human Rights and Rule of Law at the Council of Europe. Pragna Patel is the founding member of Southall Black Sisters.