Masahiro Kawai

Mr. Kawai joined the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) in January 2007 after serving as Head of Asian Development Bank’s Office of Regional Economic Integration (OREI) and Special Advisor to the ADB President in charge of regional economic cooperation and integration.

Prior to joining the ADB in October 2005, Mr. Kawai was a Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science.  Mr. Kawai also served as Chief Economist for the World Bank’s East Asia and the Pacific Region from 1998 to 2001, and worked for Japan’s Ministry of Finance from 2001 to 2003 as Deputy Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs and later as the President of the ministry’s Policy Research Institute.

Mr. Kawai began his professional career as a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC) from 1977 to 1978 and then as an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Economics of Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) from 1978 to 1986.  Afterwards, he was an Associate and Full Professor of Economics at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo.  He served as a consultant at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and at the International Monetary Fund, both in Washington, DC.  He was also Special Research Advisor at the Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy (currently Policy Research Institute) in Japan’s Ministry of Finance, and a visiting researcher at the Bank of Japan’s Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies and at the Economic Planning Agency’s Economic Research Institute (currently the Cabinet Office’s Economic and Social Research Institute).

Mr. Kawai has written books and numerous academic articles on international trade and finance, on economic globalization and regionalization, on regional financial integration and cooperation in East Asia, including lessons from the Asian financial crisis, and on the international currency system.  Some of his publications include: The New World Fiscal Order: Implications for Industrialized Nations (co-edited), Urban Institute, 1996; Exchange Rate Regimes in East Asia (co-edited), Routledge Curzon, 2004; and Policy Coherence towards East Asia: Development Challenges for OECD Countries (co-edited), Development Centre, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2005.

He graduated with his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics from the University of Tokyo’s Economics Department.  He earned his M.S. degree in Statistics and Ph.D. degree in Economics from Stanford University.