Board of Mentors
Dr. Hilton Root
Dr. Hilton Root, an academic and policy specialist in international political economy and development, is currently a member of the faculty at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University. He was Freeman Visiting Professor of Economics at Pitzer College and Senior Fellow at Claremont Graduate University from June 2003 to June 2006. He served the current administration as senior advisor on development finance to the Department of the Treasury. Dr. Root was Director and Senior Fellow of Global Studies at the Milken Institute and was a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Economic Growth and Democracy at the Hoover Institution. His areas of expertise are international economics, economic development and policy reform, and Asian affairs.
As a policy expert, Dr. Root advises the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the OECD, the US State Department, the US Treasury Department and USAID. He has completed projects in 23 countries. The analytical framework he contributed to the World Bank’s Asian Miracle study, 1993, was part of the effort to put institutions on the development agenda. While at the ADB as chief advisor on governance, he was the principal author of the ADB’s Board-approved governance policy. He presided over a committee on governance indicators at the OECD and initiated the restructuring of the Sri Lanka civil service as an advisor to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. He was one of the principal contributors to the design of the Millenium Challenge Account of the Bush administration.
As an academic, he has taught at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Root has written and lectured extensively, publishing eight books and more than 100 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He has published and presented in both the English and the French languages and has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
He has been awarded honors for The Key to the East Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible (with J. Edgardo Campos), which won the 1997 Charles H. Levine Award for best book of the year by the International Political Science Association. The Social Sciences History Association awarded him the 1995 best book prize of its Economic History Section for The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. From the American Historical Association he received the Chester Higby Prize, 1986, for the best article among those published during the previous two years. He is on the board of a number of organizations and journals including the Open Society Institute, Center for Public Integrity and Review of Pacific Basin Markets and Policies. Dr. Root received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1983.
Prof. David Leblang
Prof. David Leblang is a Chair of the GAGE (Governing America in a Global Era) program and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs and Professor of Politics at The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at University of Virginia University of Virginia.
A specialist in political economy, Prof Leblang has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, The Directorate of Finance and Economics of the European Commission, and the Department of Defense.
He is co-author of Democratic Politics and Financial Markets: Pricing Politics (2006) and more than twenty-five journal articles in publications including The American Journal of Politics, International Organization, Economics and Politics, and the Journal of International Money and Finance.
Prof. Leblang has written on the politics of economic growth, the determinants of exchange rate policy, the causes of currency crises and the link between elections and economic expectations. At present he is working on two large projects. The first examines how sending countries "harness" the human and material resources of their diasporas while the second focuses on the relationship between labor, capital and trade policies over the last century.
