This semester the Graduate Institute benefited from the work of nine of its graduates––now working at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD, and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development in Geneva—who team-taught a course on international financial flows to developing economies. The instructors rotated to teach the semester-long course in two-week segments.
The course was the brainchild of an active group of about 200 Graduate Institute Alumni in the D.C. area. The goal was to bring practitioners with at least 10 years of experience back to the school to share their on-the-job knowledge.
“It’s a form of outreach to a public that’s interested in working in international finance and development,” said Corinne Deléchat, deputy division chief in the International Monetary Fund’s Western Hemisphere Department and the course organiser. But the course served to sharpen and enhance the teachers’ work as well.
“It has enriched my work at the Fund,” Deléchat said. “My topic was private capital flows to developing and emerging countries, and one has to be really conversant with the subject matter in order to be an effective teacher. Interacting with students was also a very nice way to step back from day-to-day work and reflect on what exactly is our mission at the Fund.”
Raju Singh, another alumni instructor who works in the World Bank’s Africa region as Sector Leader/Lead Economist, and taught a segment on migration and development, said the course not only kept him fresh on the topics covered but that it has also contributed to advancing his own thinking on this topic within the Africa region.”
“In addition to discussing the basic economics of capital mobility, to teach this course I also had to get myself fully up to speed on the IMF’s new institutional view on capital flows, said Anne-Marie Gulde-Wolf, deputy director in the Fund’s African Department. “In the process I had a number of interesting discussions with other departments, and I believe came closer to a policy view for low-income countries and frontier markets.”
For Sherry Stephenson, senior fellow at ICTSD, “it was very stimulating to discuss how global value chains and services trade have altered the traditional explanations of trade patterns based on comparative advantage.”
The course combined lectures with case studies based on the instructor’s experience: Deléchat, who was mission chief for Haiti at the time of the 2010 earthquake, facilitated a discussion on the effectiveness of donor coordination for rebuilding Haiti, and Singh’s case study focused on how to mobilise diaspora remittances for greater development, including with a bond issue, a real challenge he is helping the African Union grapple with.
In addition, all the instructors were able to advise students about careers at international financial or other international institutions.