Eswar Shanker Prasad (born 1965) is an American economist. He is the Tolani Senior Professor of International Trade Policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in Economics.Brookings Institution website search, brookings.edu. Retrieved 2016-09-13."Senior Fellow and New Century Chair in International Economics, Brookings Institution", vivo.cornell.edu. "Prasad, Eswar Chairperson 2010 -". Retrieved 2016-09-13.

Early life and education Prasad began his studies in economics at the University of Madras, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1985. He received his M.A. from Brown University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992. He is married to Basia Kaminska. They have two children, Berenika Prasad, Yuvika Prasad, and their dog, Mozart.

Prasad is a former Chief of the Financial Studies Division at the International Monetary Fund’s Research Department and was also the head of the IMF’s China division. He served as the co-editor of the journal IMF Staff Papers,IMF Staff Papers, a journal of the IMF was on the editorial board of Finance & DevelopmentFinance & Development, a quarterly magazine of the IMF and was the founding editor of the quarterly IMF Research Bulletin.IMF Research Bulletin, an online quarterly bulletin He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic ResearchPrasad's author page at NBER and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn.

Prasad's research covers many areas including labor economics, business cycles, and open economy macroeconomics. He has testified before the United States Senate Committee on Finance and the United States House Committee on Financial Services (both on China), and his research has been cited in the U.S. Congressional Record. He is now also one of the two Lead Academics for the India country programme at the International Growth Centre. His publication record includes articles in many collective volumes as well as academic journals such as the American Economic Review,Modernizing China's Growth Paradigm The Economic Journal, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives,A Pragmatic Approach to Capital Account Liberalization the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics.

Economic views In a series of papers written with Michael Keane in the early 2000s, Prasad argued that the Polish model of transition, which involved rapid liberalization of prices and opening to trade ("The Big Bang"), combined with very gradual privatization of state enterprises and a generous system of social transfers, led to both superior economic growth and less inequality than occurred in other former communist countries.See, e.g., Keane, M. and E. Prasad (2002). "Inequality, Transfers and Growth: New Evidence from the Economic Transition in Poland," Review of Economics and Statistics, 84:2, 324-341.

In The Dollar Trap (2014), Prasad examined the U.S. dollar's continuing dominance in the world economy following the 2008 financial crisis. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he stated: ... it’s difficult to lay out a convincing scenario where the dollar is displaced any time in the foreseeable future as the dominant reserve currency. In international finance everything is relative. It’s not that the U.S. has especially good policies or growth prospects, it’s that the rest of the world looks weaker when it comes to putting together the powerful financial institutions that the U.S. has.... There are times, like during the debt-ceiling debate, when that trust is called into question. But the world has no other place to go, especially during times of global financial market turbulence or, paradoxically, even turbulence originating in the U.S.Davis, Bob, "8 Questions: Eswar Prasad, ‘The Dollar Trap’", Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2014.

Prasad was asked in 2014 to comment on whether he believed President Barack Obama would impose harsher sanctions against Russia for their aggression against Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Prasad said harsher sanctions at this time were unlikely.

In October 2016, Prasad published Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi. As the date for the designation of the Chinese renminbi as an IMF major global currency also approached, Prasad thinks fears of a [Chinese] financial meltdown are overblown. Most borrowers and lenders, he points out, are owned by the government, so banks are unlikely to pull their loans and precipitate a cascading crisis. Still, economic and financial fragility, he argues, will limit the rise of the Chinese yuan as a global “safe haven” currency.Browne, Andrew, "Chinese Debt Soars Into Space", Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2016. Retrieved 2016-09-13.

The book was launched at Brookings with a panel including Prasad, Ben Bernanke and others moderated by Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal.Gaining Currency, global.oup.com. Retrieved 2016-09-13.

References

External links

Prasad's work on the 2008 financial crisis at the Brookings Institution