Regional Workshop on Blue Economy, Disaster Risk Financing, and Ocean Infrastructure

Mr. Chul Ju Kim is the deputy dean (focusing on capacity building and training, and special activities) of the Asian Development Bank Institute. A national of the Republic of Korea, he was a secretary to President of Republic of Korea for economic and financial affairs before joining ADBI. For more than 30 years, Mr. Kim had been a key policy maker on a wide range of macroeconomic, financial, and social issues in the government of the Republic of Korea. He served in core positions such as deputy minister for planning and coordination, director general of the economic policy and public policy Bureaus at the Ministry of Strategy and Finance. He also has extensive experience in international development issues, having worked at the World Bank and ADB. Mr. Kim holds a BA in economics from Seoul National University, and an MS in finance from Georgia State University in the US.

Paresh Kumar Narayan is Alfred Deakin professor in the Deakin Business School (Deakin University). He is also president of the Asia-Pacific Applied Economics Association, editor-in-chief of Economic Modelling, managing editor of Bulletin of Monetary Economics & Banking, and an adjunct professor at INCEIF (Kuala Lumpur) and IIT (Hyderabad). His research interests are in applied econometrics and financial markets. He has published over 300 papers in international refereed journals with over 80% of his papers appearing in social science citation impact factor journals. Based on the Australia Business Deans Council (ABDC) journal rankings, Mr. Narayan has published 35 papers in A-star journals and over 180 papers in A-ranked impact factor journals. Professor Narayan is among the top-90 researchers globally from business schools whose work is most cited in 2017 & 2018. He holds the distinguished title of a high cite researcher—part of a group of only 3 such researchers in Australia.

Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary is an assistant professor of economics at the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, and visiting professor at Keio University in Tokyo. He completed his master's degree in energy economics from Tehran University, Iran, in 2011 and obtained a PhD in energy economics from Keio University in 2015 with a scholarship from the government of Japan. Following this, he taught as assistant professor at Keio University until March 2018. He was also a visiting scholar and visiting professor at several institutions and universities such as the Institute of Energy Economics of Japan, the Credit Risk Database Association of Japan, and the Graduate School of Economics of the University of Tokyo. Mr. Taghizadeh-Hesary has published on a wide range of topics, including energy economics, green finance, small and medium-sized enterprises finance, monetary policy, and banking. His credits include authoring more than 50 academic journal papers and book chapters, and the editing of six books.

Chi Hun Lee is senior researcher in the National Disaster Management Research Institute (NMDI) of the Republic of Korea. He works for international cooperation related to disaster risk reduction and doing official development assistance projects for Lao PDR, the Philippines, and Viet Nam. Prior to joining NMDI in 2011, he received a doctoral degree in water resources engineering from the Civil Engineering Department at Texas A&M University.

Baljeet Singh is senior lecturer in the School of Economics of the University of the South Pacific. He has published several research papers in international peer-reviewed journals such Energy Economics, Economic Modelling, and Applied Economics. Prior to joining the University of the South Pacific, he was an economic planning officer at the Ministry of National Planning, Fiji.

Atsushi Sunami obtained MIA and PhD in political science from Columbia University. He now serves as president and executive director of the Ocean Policy Research Institute, Sasakawa Peace Foundation. He is also currently professor and executive advisor to the president at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan. He was a fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry established by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan between 2001 and 2003. He also worked as a researcher in the Department of Policy Research at Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. from 1989 to 1991. He was a visiting researcher at Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, and Tsinghua University, People's Republic of China. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Promotion of Science and Technology Diplomacy in Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, the Council for Science and Technology in Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Dayong Zhang is professor of financial economics at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, People's Republic of China (PRC). He has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is principal investigator of a number of grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of PRC, British Academy, and others. He serves as associate editor for a number of academic journals including: Emerging Market Finance and Trade, International Review of Financial Analysis, International Review of Economics and Finance, International Journal of Emerging Markets, and Finance Research Letters. He is also co-founder of the PRC Energy Finance Network and serves on the board of directors of the Society for the Study of Emerging Markets. Mr. Zhang received his PhD from the University of Birmingham (UK). His research interests cover broad areas of energy economics, energy finance, banking and finance, urban and regional economics, and general economic and financial issues mainly in emerging economies.

Dan Millison is currently a consultant for ADB’s Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department, and is the Manager of Transcendergy LLC, a private consultancy established in 2008 to provide sustainable infrastructure solutions. He has helped mobilize investments of over $10 billion in sustainable energy and transport infrastructure, including more than $1 billion of cofinancing from the Clean Technology Fund, the Scaling Up Renewable Energy Program, and the Green Climate Fund. He was formerly a senior energy specialist at ADB, and previously worked in the environmental services and oil and gas industries. He holds an MS in civil engineering and a BA in geological sciences, both from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Janesh Sami joined the School of Economics at the University of the South Pacific in 2017. He obtained his PhD in economics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has previously worked for Fiji's Bureau of Statistics and assisted in the analysis of census data. He has taught at Fiji Institute of Technology, Fiji National University, and the University of Newcastle. Mr. Sami has also published a number of papers in internationally refereed journals, and presented his research at various conferences in Australia, India, Mauritius, Singapore, Thailand, and the US. He has also served as a reviewer for international and national journals on several occasions. He research interests are in applied econometrics, open economy macroeconomics, financial economics, and eevelopment issues faced by Pacific island economies.

Susan Sharma is a senior lecturer in the Department of Finance at Deakin Business School. Susan holds a PhD in finance from Deakin University. Her research in finance has employed a wide range of recent developments in financial econometrics. Ms. Sharma's research interests are in the areas of panel predictability models, time-series econometric models, price discovery, commodity markets, forecasting, and energy markets. She has published a number of articles in influential finance and economics journals, such as Journal of Banking and Finance and Energy Economics.

Pitchaya Sirivunnabood’s expertise is international economics and finance, specializing in regional economic integration and financial cooperation as well as bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, development of financial markets, and international/ transnational investment. Prior to joining ADBI, she was an assistant director and the head of the finance integration division at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia. She was senior researcher and policy consultant for a Thai government think tank, the UNDP’s Asia Pacific Regional Center, and the European Association for Business and Commerce. She was also an assistant director and macroeconomist at the ASEAN Integration Monitoring Office, in charge of surveillance and monitoring process for the ASEAN Economic Community. She has a PhD in international economics (trade and finance) from the University of Utah in the US. Her expertise is international economics and finance, specializing in regional economic integration and financial cooperation as well as bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, development of financial markets, and international/transnational investment.

Joeli Veitayaki is an associate professor at the School of Marine Studies, Fiji. He is also director of the International Ocean Institute Pacific Islands, based at the University of the South Pacific (USP), and is co-chair of the Korea-South Pacific Ocean Forum. He is a trained teacher who did his bachelor of arts in education and master of arts studies at the USP. He obtained his PhD in environment management and development from the National Centre of Development Studies at the Australian National University. Apart from teaching, Mr. Veitayaki conducts research in different parts of Fiji and Pacific island countries with partners from USP and abroad to promote the sustainable use and management of marine resources. He has written articles and books on the importance of subsistence and artisanal fisheries, indigenous knowledge and traditional resources management systems, culture, capacity building, climate change, disaster risk reduction, community based resource management, sustainable development and law of the sea, maritime transport, and regional cooperation in the Pacific islands. He also has worked as a trainer and researcher in most of the Pacific island countries as well as in Australia, Canada, Malta, US, South Africa, Portugal, Japan, France, Norway, Korea, Scotland, and the Caribbean.

Nepomuk Dunz joined IIASA in 2018 and is a researcher with the Risk and Resilience (RISK) program. Mr Dunz holds a master’s degree in socioecological economics and policy from Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research work at IIASA focuses on the integration of natural disaster risks into structural macroeconomic models of development to understand socioeconomic challenges for developing countries in the realm of ongoing climate change. Thereby generated insights on developing countries’ financial and economic constraints could enable the advancement of strategies for building up economic and financial resilience. Further research interests of Nepomuk Dunz lie in the field of ecological macroeconomics and sustainable finance. By applying a stock-flow consistent modelling approach, Mr. Dunz investigates the roles of technological change, international trade, income distribution and financial flows for achieving a socioecological low-carbon transition.

Mr. Huang is currently affiliated with the Ocean Policy Research Institute as a research fellow after serving as a researcher at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) –Science for RE-designing Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (SciREX) Center. His fields of specialization are general equilibrium, political economy, and disaster risk assessment. Mr. Huang is in charge of economic analysis for blue economy, blue finance, and risk assessment of water-related natural disasters. In 2015, he Huang was conferred a PhD in public economics from GRIPS. He is also an adjunct lecturer for special economic seminars at the faculty of Economics in Toyo University. Mr. Huang is a member of the Japan Society of Ocean Policy, Japan Economic Association, Applied Regional Science Conference, and Japan Castle Association.

Hajime Tanaka became affiliated with the Ocean Policy Research Institute as an associate program officer from October 2018 after he received his master's degrees in economics from Waseda University and in international affairs from University of California in San Diego. His fields of specialization are macroeconomics, policy evaluation, and geographical information analysis. Mr. Tanaka is in charge of projects in blue economy, blue finance, and ocean microplastic debris. In particular, he is currently working on ocean microplastic debris and managing field research in cities of Kanagawa prefecture in Japan. For blue economy, he is working on the analysis of management of companies in the marine product processing industry.

Nagisa Yoshioka is an associate program officer with the Ocean Policy Research Institute, Sasakawa Peace Foundation. Her research focuses on climate change adaptation in the Asia and Pacific region. She received her master’s degree in international studies from the University of Tokyo. She also holds a bachelor’s in economics from Kyoto University. She has been conducting research on climate risk finance, with a focus on weather index insurance, as well as climate induced migration.