The 25th Joseph Mubiru Memorial Lecture will be held on December 01, 2017 and will be delivered by Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, a University Reader in Political Economy of Development, in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.
The lecture is titled; “Ambition, Pragmatism, and Imagination – Rethinking the Role of the State in Economic Development.”
The panelists will comprise; Allen Kagina, Executive Director Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), Prof. Charles Kwesiga, Executive Director, Uganda Industrial Research Institute and Wilbrod Owor, Executive Director Uganda Bankers’ Association (UBA).
This year’s moderator will be Communications Consultant, Mr. Edmond Kizito.
The role of the state in economic development – especially in engineering structural transformation from a subsistence agrarian economy to a diversified high productivity industrial economy – has been a contentious issue throughout the history of capitalism.
In this lecture, Dr. Ha-Joon Chang will review the historical evolution of the theories and the practices of state intervention over the last three centuries and discuss what lessons we can draw from it in rethinking the role of the state in economic development.
He will emphasise how an ambitious state aiming for a major structural transformation is a key ingredient in a country’s development success but how this ambition needs to be tempered by realism along the way.
He will also argue that a successful development effort requires imagination on the part of policy makers that will free them from shackles of ideological prejudices, historical patterns, and social norms to engage in truly pragmatic policy making.
The late Mubiru will always be remembered for his contribution to Banking in various professional capacities during the formative years of the industry in Uganda and beyond. As the first Governor of Bank of Uganda, he is credited with laying a strong and lasting foundation on which the Bank has over the years built and executed its constitutional mandate.
Mubiru served as Governor from 1966 up to August 1971 when his contract expired.
In recognition of Mubiru’s outstanding contribution to the financial and economic development of Uganda, coupled with the impeccable professionalism he actively fostered in Uganda’s banking industry, Bank of Uganda organizes annual Joseph Mubiru Memorial Lectures, during which economic/financial topical issues of the day are discussed by leading personalities.
Profile of Guest Speaker
Ha-Joon Chang, a Korean national, was born in Seoul, Korea on 7 October 1963. He earned his B.A. from the Department of Economics, Seoul National University, Korea, and earned his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
He has taught at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, since 1990. He has also served as a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Journal of Economics since 1992 and is currently on the advisory board of many other journals.
Apart from his academic activities, Ha-Joon Chang has worked as a consultant for numerous international organisations, including various UN agencies (UNDESA, UNCTAD, WIDER, UNDP, UNIDO, UNRISD, INTECH, FAO, ECLAC, and ILO), the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the European Investment Bank. He has also worked as a consultant for a number of governments (such as Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Namibia, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam). He sits on the Policy Advisory Council of the UK think-tank, IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) and is a Senior Research Associate of the US think-tank CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research).
Ha-Joon Chang has published 16 authored books (five of them co-authored) and 10 edited books (six of them co-edited).
Ha-Joon Chang is the winner of the 2003 Myrdal Prize, awarded to his book, Kicking Away the Ladder, by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) and the winner (jointly with Richard Nelson of Columbia University) of the 2005 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought awarded by Tufts University (winners of the Prize include the Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Daniel Kahnemann as well as John Kenneth Galbraith and Albert Hirschman).
In 2014, Chang was ranked no. 9 in the World Thinkers poll by the Prospect magazine.
