Addressing Infrastructure Deficits and Transforming Finance in Asia

Please join us for the third in the series of five lectures on the Asian Century by NCAER Distinguished Fellow, Mr Rajat M. Nag. Much of Asia is still plagued by severe physical infrastructure deficits. This lecture will address the important challenges of meeting such infrastructure deficits, both hard and soft, and how they could be financed from both public and private sources. Institutional arrangements for meeting the infrastructure challenges in Asia, including through public private partnerships will be discussed.  As Asia’s share in the global economy grows, it should also have proportionately similar shares of financial assets to efficiently recycle and allocate its huge savings and foreign reserves. The lecture will discuss how this transformation will unfold and also address the important aspects of financial inclusion.

In the Asian Century Lectures, Rajat Nag examines the challenges that Asia must confront and the opportunities it must exploit to make this century the Asian Century, a proposition that he argues is plausible but not inevitable. In his first lecture, Nag spoke about the need to pursue an inclusive growth strategy to meet the challenges of rising inequality in Asia. The second lecture covered the demographics of Asia and the need for high productivity jobs. The remaining two lectures over the next few months will cover regional cooperation and integration and the competition for natural resources and governance, institutions, and green growth.

Rajat Nag is the former Managing Director-General of the Asian Development Bank and now a Distinguished Fellow at NCAER. He is currently also the Chair of the Look East Council of the Indian Chamber of Commerce, a Visiting Professor at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, and a Senior Fellow at the Emerging Markets Forum, Washington, DC.  Mr Nag began his professional career at the Bank of Canada, and held senior positions in international consulting before joining the ADB. He has engineering degrees from IIT, Delhi and the University of Saskatchewan. He also has an MBA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics.

For up-to-date information on the Asian Century Lectures, please visit www.ncaer.org.

Please join us for high tea after the lecture. For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org, or on 91-11-2345-2669.