Welcome to
New Economic Thinking, Teaching and Policy Perspectives –
A Brazilian Perspective within a Global Dialogue

Rio de Janeiro/Brazil November 7-9, 2011

The Ford Foundation is developing a strategic initiative, springing from its Reforming Global Financial Governance portfolio, whose goal is to extract lessons from the BICs countries both in terms of weathering the financial crisis and in crafting institutions to support effective and democratic financial governance and sustain development, employment, and poverty reduction. The founding event for this initiative will be a conference, in Rio de Janeiro, on New Economic Thinking, Teaching and Policy Perspectives - A Brazilian Perspective within a Global Dialogue. The conference’s goal is to combine “thinking outside the box” with “looking outside the box” in the sense of developing new analytical frameworks, but also exploring countries, policies, policy makers and teaching programs outside the US-EU axis, whit whom we would seek engagement in order to help us achieve these goals.

This is an important event which will help to address the continuing impact of the financial-turned-fiscal crisis and to highlight the importance of the BICs countries, plus some other G20 members, in weathering it and pushing for a new “policy and institutional compact”. The Ford Foundation, an organization engaged with advancing progressive thinking, social justice and democratic governance, sees the crisis as a unique opportunity to reframe the thinking and the narrative, especially in economics, that contributed to the current state of affairs. The conference aims to contribute to broaden the international dialogue on the three fronts outlined above: new thinking, teaching experiences and designing new curricula, as well as crafting and implementing more effective and socially responsible policy mixes.