Professor Erik Berglof is the inaugural Chief Economist at the Asian Infrastruture Investment Bank, where he sets the vision and strategy for the Economics Department and leads the planning, implementation and supervision of its work plan in support of the Bank’s mandate. Prior to joining AIIB in September 2020, he was Director of the Institute of Global Affairs and of its Global Policy Lab at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Previously, he was a member of the Secretariat for the G20 Eminent Persons Group, tasked with reviewing global financial governance, and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Futures Council on the Financial and Monetary Systems. He is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York.
From 2006 to 2015, Professor Berglof was the Chief Economist and Special Adviser to the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), where he was part of creating and co-led the Vienna Initiative, a European crisis response team credited with mitigating the impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.
Before that, he was Director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) and Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He was Assistant Professor at Universite Libre de Bruxelles and has held visiting positions at Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has also served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Sweden.
An expert in transition economics and institutional transformation through private sector development, Professor Berglof has published widely in top journals on economic and political transition, corporate governance, financial development and EU reform. He holds a PhD in Financial Economics and an MA in Business and Economics, both from the Stockholm School of Economics.
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Betty is Senior Advisor and former Chief Executive Officer of Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Zambia, a non-profit corporation developed to expand and deepen financial inclusion and to address financial sector reform issues. Ms. Wilkinson has over 30 years of professional experience in the development assistance field worldwide, including as a leading multilateral bank manager, policy advisor, field researcher, and senior government official in the finance and planning ministry of a recipient country. With expertise in the fields of finance, financial sector reform and private sector development, and gender, she has worked in emergency environments and in transition situations in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and Tajikistan among others.
From 2003 to 2015 Ms Wilkinson was Senior Manager and official at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). From 2012 to 2015 she was sector director for finance, public management, trade, private sector, social protection, education and health for the Central Asia group, incorporating Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. She led Departmental and ADB-wide teams in financial sector reform and innovation, MSME development, gender, and human resources improvement in various countries such as the People’s Republic of China, Mongolia, and the Central Asia group. Prior to joining the ADB, she worked as Associate Director at the Centre for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector (IRIS) at the University of Maryland, including as resident Director in Nepal and Zambia. At IRIS Ms. Wilkinson led major worldwide initiatives to develop model frameworks of small enterprise, agribusiness, and finance legislation. She developed key policy enhancement initiatives in countries such as Angola, China, Nepal, Russia, and South Africa.
Ms. Wilkinson engages globally with ministers, central bank governors, industry representatives, and leaders of development agencies, NGOs, think tanks, and communities to facilitate evidence-based innovation and change. She holds a BA in Business Economics from UC Santa Barbara and an MS (abd) in Agricultural Economics from Cornell University.
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Avila Kilmurray has worked in Northern Ireland since 1975. She was Regional Coordinator of the Rural Action Project (NI) – an EU Anti-Poverty Programme; Development Officer with the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action; and Women’s Officer with the Transport & General Workers Union.
From 1994-2014, Avila was Director of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, managing EU funding programmes that supported political ex-prisoners, victims/survivors of violence and grassroots community activism. The Community Foundation for Northern Ireland was a founder member of the Foundations for Peace Network, a peer network of independent indigenous funders working in contested societies. Avila has long been active in the women’s movement and was a founder member of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, joining its negotiating team for the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. She has written extensively on community development, women’s issues, conflict transformation and philanthropy.
Avila is currently working as a consultant with The Social Change Initiative, an international NGO working to strengthen civil society activism and advocacy in the areas of human rights, migration/refugee rights and community-based peacebuilding. She is a member of the Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice & Peace. Avila was appointed Honorary Professor in the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University and remains actively involved in philanthropy and peacebuilding. She has a PhD from the Institute of Governance, Queens University Belfast.
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