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Two professors will offer opposing views on the collapse of the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun noon today in Interfaith Chapel, Hogg Hall.
The brown bag event is titled “Do the European Union and the United States Dictate the World Economy?” and is sponsored by Lafayette Association of Fair Trade Advocates (LAFTA), Lafayette African and Caribbean Students Association, and Students for Social Justice.
James DeVault, associate professor of economics and business, will moderate the forum. Rexford Ahene, professor of economics and business, will speak in support of the walkout by representatives of a group of developing nations and David Stifel, assistant professor of economics and business, will speak against it.
“We hope that this brown bag will foster an awareness of the role that the United States in particular plays in global trade relations,” says LAFTA leader Martha Osier ’06 (Nairobi, Kenya). “The focus will be to examine the pros and cons of the walkout staged by 23 developing nations at the recent WTO talks, with the hope of uncovering exactly why these nations walked out, who was to blame, and what is the way forward from here, if at all.”
While serving as land policy adviser for the government of Malawi, Ahene secured a $576,500 grant from the World Bank last year that funded his design of a land reform program, as well as additional studies and implementation of his work.
His areas of expertise include economic development; land policy reform and institutional restructuring; housing and urban development; economics, politics, and international relations relating to Africa; real estate investment policy; and international business. He received a bachelor’s degree in real estate from University of Science and Technology, Kumansi, Ghana; a master’s in economics from Virginia State University; and a masters in agricultural economics and Ph.D. in urban land policy from University of Wisconsin.
Listed in Who’s Who in Agriculture Higher Education, published in August, Stifel spent a year conducting research in Antananarivo, Madagascar from 2000-01, when he helped design a nationally representative household survey.
His areas of expertise including development economics and applied micro-econometrics; poverty and multidimensional welfare dynamics; economics of nutrition; and land tenure, equity, and poverty. His main research interests are in applied development economics, focusing recently on the dynamics of poverty and the multidimensional aspects of welfare in Africa. A new member of the Lafayette faculty, Stifel comes from Cornell University, where he was research associate in the Food and Nutrition Policy program and taught several courses. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Cornell, an M.A. in international relations from Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.A. in Asian Studies from Colgate University.