Pardee Center Luncheon with Featured Speaker, Paulo Nogueira Batista, Junior on “The IMF, Capital Controls, and Developing Countries”

Paulo Nogueira Batista, Junior, the Executive Director for Brazil and eight other Latin American countries at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was the featured speaker at a Pardee Center Luncheon on Friday, Sept. 16 at the Trustees Ballroom at Boston University.

The event was sponsored by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future with BU Global Development and the BU Center for Finance, Law, and Policy. Approximately 80 people, including many graduate students from the co-sponsoring programs, attended.

In his talk, titled “The IMF, Capital Controls, and Developing Countries,” Mr. Batista spoke about the ongoing contentious debate at the IMF and among other economists and other high-level financial policy makers concerning whether and how capital investments between countries should be regulated, especially capital flowing from developed to developing countries. He said Brazil and other developing countries have spoken out against a proposed IMF framework for imposing controls, and he anticipated the debate – which he characterized as “intense and unpleasant” – will continue at the IMF annual meeting in Washington, D.C. this week.

The lunchtime talk was associated with a Pardee Center Task Force meeting of prominent scholars and economists on the long-range impacts for development of capital investments between developed and developing countries. The Task Force meeting was convened by Pardee Center Faculty Fellow Kevin Gallagher in collaboration with José Antonio Ocampo and Stephany Griffith-Jones of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) at Columbia University, and IPD helped arrange for Mr. Nogueira Batista to speak at the event.

Mr. Nogueira Batista, a well-known Brazilian economist, has been the Executive Director representing Brazil and a group of eight countries in the region at the IMF since April 2007. He previously served as Under Secretary for Economics Affairs, Ministry of Planning, and as Advisor to the Minister of Finance on External Debt, Ministry of Finance in Brazil. He is the author of four books and a vast list of economic papers and publications, and is a contributor to a major Brazilian newspaper.