The Asian Century Lectures: Regional Cooperation and Integration

Please join us for the fourth in the series of five lectures on the Asian Century by NCAER Distinguished Fellow, Mr Rajat M. Nag. Our commentator will be Mr Shyam Saran, Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board and Chairman of RIS.  Please join us for dinner after the lecture.

Asia’s prosperity and security in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world will require greater regional cooperation in a spirit of open regionalism and not fortress Asia. Sub-regional cooperation initiatives have flourished, some more than others, in various parts of Asia, and the prospects of combining them, leading to greater Pan Asian integration, will be assessed in this lecture. As Asia grows economically and its standard of living increases, its demand for natural resources will increase significantly. In this lecture, Nag will also discuss how the competition for resources between the growing Asian economies, particularly large ones like China and India, will evolve.

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. While the second lecture covered the demographics of Asia and the need for high productivity jobs, Rajat’s third lecture addressed the challenges of infrastructure deficit and the need for a robust financial sector in Asia.  The last lecture (on June 9th) will cover the issues of good 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.

Shyam Saran is the Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board and Chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries. Ambassador Saran’s career in the Indian Foreign Services, spanning 36 years, has taken him to Beijing, Tokyo and Geneva. He has also served as India’s Ambassador to Indonesia and Nepal, and High Commissioner to Mauritius. In 2011, Ambassador Saran was awarded the Padma Bhushan.

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