Keynotes

Martin LARCH

Martin Larch is Head of Secretariat at European Fiscal Board, European Commission. He has been with the European Commission since 2000. Before taking up his current position as Head of Secretariat of the European Fiscal Board he worked as Head of Unit in charge of Ireland during the country’s financial assistance program. His earlier assignments at the Commission also include one as Adviser in the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA) reporting to the Commission President. His interests and publications focus on macro-fiscal issues, including in particular fiscal policy making in the European Union and the distribution of income.

Paul de GRAUWE  

Prior to joining London School of Economics, Paul De Grauwe was Professor of International Economics at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He was a member of the Belgian parliament from 1991 to 2003. He is honorary doctor of the University of Sankt Gallen (Switzerland), of the University of Turku (Finland), the University of Genoa, the University of Valencia and Maastricht University. He was a visiting professor at various universities and a visiting scholar at the IMF, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank. He was a member of the Group of Economic Policy Analysis, advising President Barroso. He is also director of the money, macro and international finance research network of CESifo, University of Munich. He is a research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. His research interests are international monetary relations, monetary integration, theory and empirical analysis of the foreign-exchange markets, and open-economy macroeconomics.

Marco BUTI

Marco Buti has been Director-General for Economic and Financial Affairs at the European Commission since December 2008, after a 6-month period as acting Director-General. After studies at the Universities of Florence and Oxford, Mr Buti joined the European Commission in 1987. He held various posts as an economist in DG ECFIN and the Commissioner's cabinet (private office) before taking up a post as an economic adviser to the Commission President in 2002-03. In 2003 he returned to DG ECFIN as Director for the Directorate for economies of the Member States, and in September 2006 was appointed Deputy Director-General. Mr Buti has been a visiting professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Florence and the European University Institute, and has published extensively on Economic and Monetary Union, macroeconomic policies, welfare state reforms, and European unemployment.