Mark Weisbrot

Mark Weisbrot is an American economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, and is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), a refutation of prevailing wisdom on reform of the Social Security system in the United States. He has written extensively about the economies of developing countries, with special attention to Latin America. More recently, Weisbrot and others at CEPR have criticized the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), claiming that they "exacerbate the [late-2000s] world economic downturn".

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Weisbrot has been a critic of IMF-supported policies in developing countries, as well as IMF policy with respect to the late-2000s recession.

He has also been a critic of globalization. According to CEPR, Weisbrot documented in a 2001 paper long-term economic growth failure in the vast majority of developing countries since 1980, as well as the consequent decline in progress on such social indicators as life expectancy and infant and child mortality. The evidence did not indicate a broad decline in the indicators measured, nor that these declines were the result of policy changes, but CEPR says that there is "certainly no evidence in these data that the policies associated with globalization have improved outcomes for most low to middle-income countries". In a 2005 followup, CEPR said that, "contrary to popular belief, the past 25 years (1980–2005) have seen a sharply slower rate of economic growth and reduced progress on social indicators for the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries", and that, "'It is generally difficult to show a clear relationship between any particular policy change and economic outcomes, especially across countries. There are many changes that take place at the same time, and causality is difficult to establish. It is certainly possible that the decline in economic and social progress that has taken place over the last 25 years would have been even worse in the absence of the policy changes that were adopted."

Columnist and author

Weisbrot writes a column for The Guardian, and an opinion column on economic and policy issues that is distributed nationwide by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times/International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Nation. He has written for and been interviewed by online magazines such as Common Dreams NewsCenter, The Huffington Post, and Alternet, both as original work and as republication of syndicated columns. He has appeared on national and local television and radio programs, including CBS, the PBS Newshour, CNN, the BBC, National Public Radio and Fox News.

Latin America

Weisbrot has several times contributed testimony to Congressional hearings, in 2002 to a House of Representatives committee, on Argentina's 1999 - 2002 economic crisis and in 2004 to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the state of democracy in Venezuela, and on media representation of Hugo Chávez and of Chávez's Venezuela. Weisbrot is also the President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy. Weisbrot advised Oliver Stone on South of the Border, a 2009 film about Chavez.

External links

• "Latvia's Recession: The Cost of Adjustment With An "Internal Devaluation"". February 2010. Retrieved February 9, 2010.
• "Bolivia: The Economy During the Morales Administration". December 2009. Retrieved February 9, 2010.
• [1] New York Times, August 11, 2009 article titled More of the Same in Latin America.
• [2] Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2009 article titled The high-powered hidden support for Honduras' coup.