PROFILE OF SPEAKERS

Erlinda Medalla is a Member of the Eminent Expert Resource Committee of the Philippine APEC Vision Group. She was a Senior Research Fellow at PIDS and Project Director of the Philippine APEC Study Center Network. Her areas of expertise are trade, competition policy, and industrial policy. She has written a number of papers and book chapters on trade and investment, competition policy, and regional economic integration, among other topics. She has a PhD in Economics from the UP School of Economics and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

Ernesto Pernia is the Secretary of Socioeconomic Planning, National Economic and Development Authority, Philippines. He is also Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of the Philippines.

Pernia was Lead Economist at the Asian Development Bank. His work experience covered investment climate and productivity, economic growth and poverty reduction, education and health, population and development, and regional economic cooperation in Asia. He was also Regional Adviser on population and employment policy for Asia and the Pacific with the International Labour Organization.

He has served as chair of the board of trustees of the University of San Carlos, and a director on the board of the Philippine-American Academy of Science and Engineering (PAASE). He is also on the boards of some nongovernment organizations involved in education and health concerns, and population and development. He is a former president of the Philippine Economic Society.

He obtained his PhD degree from the University of California Berkeley on a Ford Foundation scholarship. He received the first award as Outstanding Young Scientist (economics and social sciences) from the National Academy of Science and Technology. He was chosen by the PAASE for the 2015 Science Lectureship Award. He has been inducted to the PAASE Hall of Honor as of April 2018.

Pernia has authored several books and articles in national and international journals. He was an occasional contributor of public-interest commentaries in major Philippine and some international dailies.

Celia Reyes is the first female president of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS). She specializes in the field of econometrics and has conducted and published numerous research and policy papers on poverty assessments and evaluations of social protection programs.

She is also the network leader of the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS), providing free technical assistance to local government units in the country in the implementation of the CBMS. The CBMS is a local poverty monitoring tool she developed under the Micro Impacts of Macroeconomic Adjustment Policies project.

As an expert in poverty research, Reyes has been engaged as project leader and resource person in various consultancy projects of international organizations. She also served as president of the Philippine Economic Society in 2011 and has been an adviser to various national government technical working groups on poverty monitoring and indicator systems in the country since the early 1990s. She is currently the chairperson of the Interagency Committee on Poverty Statistics convened by the Philippine Statistics Authority, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Philippine Journal of Development, PIDS’ multidisciplinary social science journal that publishes policy-oriented studies and researches on development issues in the Asia-Pacific region.

Reyes has a Master of Arts degree in Economics from UP and a PhD degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Coco Alcuaz is executive director of the Makati Business Club (MBC). Prior to joining MBC, he was bureau chief at Bloomberg News, business news head and anchor at ABS-CBN News Channel, and contributor at Rappler.

Richard Edward Baldwin is a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, where he has been conducting research on globalization and trade for 30 years. He is also the former President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU, an organization that is devoted to promoting “research-based policy analysis and commentary by leading economists”. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was twice elected as a Member of the Council of the European Economic Association.
 
Baldwin finished his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980 and received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 1981. He completed his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and received honorary doctorates from the Turku School of Economics in Finland, University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
 
Baldwin has an extensive published work in the areas of globalization, international trade, regionalism, European integration, economic geography, political economy, among others. His book entitled, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, published in November 2016, was listed as one of the year’s best books by the Financial Times and The Economist magazines.
 
Baldwin’s latest book entitled, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work, tackles the role of digital technology in driving both globalization and automation of service and professional jobs in advanced economies.

Calum Cameron is an experienced chief technology officer and has built and led digital project teams on financial service enterprises for over 20 years. He has been a key influencer in the development of the Estonian startup ecosystem. He served as the head of Europe’s premier B2B and B2G startup accelerator where he led the marketing of Estonia as a startup incubator and sandbox for disruptive businesses and worked closely with many of the companies that now deliver Estonia’s digital society.

Cameron has lived across the world and witnessed the different approaches towards e-government in different regions across the world. He is also engaged in the startup community and the private sector.

Antonio Carpio was sworn in as a member of the Supreme Court on October 26, 2001. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Economics from the Ateneo de Manila University and his law degree from the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Law, where he graduated valedictorian in 1975. Fresh out of law school, Carpio went into private practice and founded the Carpio, Villaraza and Cruz Law firm. He was also a Professorial Lecturer of the UP College of Law from 1983 until 1992 when he was appointed Chief Presidential Legal Counsel by President Fidel Ramos. Under the Ramos Administration, he worked for major reforms in the telecommunications, shipping, civil aviation, and insurance industries. He was also a member of the Technology Transfer Board of the Department of Industry (1978–1979), a Special Representative of the Department of Trade for textile negotiations (1980–1981), and President of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, Pasay-Makati Chapter (1985). In 2015, the Department of Foreign Affairs sponsored Carpio on a world lecture tour on the West Philippine Sea dispute. In 2017, he published a book titled, The South China Sea Dispute: Philippine Sovereign Rights and Jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea.

Cielito Habito is a Professor of Economics at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he is also a Senior Fellow and former Director of the Ateneo Center for Economic Research and Development. He is also Chairman of Brain Trust Inc. and Operation Compassion Philippines. His op-ed column “No Free Lunch” appears twice weekly in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. In 1992–1998, he served in the Cabinet of former President Fidel V. Ramos as Secretary of Socioeconomic Planning heading the National Economic and Development Authority. In 1998, he was elected Chair of the Sixth Session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in New York. Before joining government, he was Professor and Chair at the Department of Economics of the University of the Philippines (UP) Los Baños. He had also worked at the World Bank, Harvard University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto University, and Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo. Over the years, he has been tapped by multilateral and bilateral development agencies to advise the government of the Philippines and of other countries in Asia-Pacific and Latin America. He has served on the boards of First Gen, Sun Life Financial, Manila Water Company, Metrobank, and Philsteel Holdings, among others. He holds a PhD and MA in Economics from Harvard University, Master of Economics from the University of New England (Australia), and BS in Agriculture major in agricultural economics (summa cum laude) from the UP.

Toby Melissa Monsod is an Associate Professor at the UP School of Economics. She finished her PhD in Economics at the UP. Her research interests are in the fields of public economics, development economics, regional and housing economics, and impact evaluation. She is a member of the Philippine Human Development Network and has been the lead author and/or co-editor of
award-winning volumes of the Philippine Human Development Report (www.hdn.org.ph). Prior to entering the academe, she worked for several years with community-based groups and served in government as Undersecretary of Housing and Assistant Secretary of Trade and Industry.

Lucas Chancel is Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and World Inequality Database (WID.world) at the Paris School of Economics, which he joined in 2015. He lectures at Sciences Po in the Master of Public Policy on the economics of inequality and sustainable development. He has been Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations since 2011, where he conducts research on the social dimension of sustainable development.

He holds a PhD in Economics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris Sciences Lettres Research University, an MS in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po and Ecole Polytechnique, an MS in Energy Science from Imperial College London, and a BS in Physics and Social Sciences from Paris VI and Sciences Po. He also studied at the London School of Economics and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.