Keynote plenaries

In 2015, the Swiss Federal Council appointed Andréa M Maechler as Member of the Swiss National Bank’s Governing Board. She is the first woman to occupy a Board position. At the same time, she became Head of Department III (Money Market and Foreign Exchange, Asset Management, Banking Operations, Information Technology). She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Banking and Finance at the University of Zurich.

Andréa M Maechler’s early career took her to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). From 1999 to 2001, she worked as an economist in the Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) Financial Stability unit in Zurich. She then moved to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she occupied several senior positions in the Africa, Monetary and Capital Markets, Western Hemisphere and Strategy, Policy and Review departments. From 2012 to 2014, during a sabbatical from the IMF, she worked for the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) in Frankfurt. Upon returning to the IMF, she was appointed as Deputy Division Chief in the Global Markets Analysis Division. The functions of this division include monitoring global capital markets, and assessing systemic risks and the macro-financial impact of capital market developments.

She was born in Geneva in 1969. She studied economics at the University of Toronto, and then at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where she obtained her Master’s in International Economics. Following a period of study at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Public Administration in Lausanne, she obtained her PhD in International Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2000.

Competitiveness refers to the ability of nations to generate welfare and employment. We will consider the competitiveness model of different countries and four complementary strategies as follows: (1) reduce the size of the state at the expense of the private sector; (2) promote export-oriented growth; (3) develop inclusive institutions; and (4) balance the social costs of income inequality vs. the benefits of globalization.