Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury Editor

Shahid Javed Burki is an economist who has been a member of the faculty at Harvard University, USA, and Chief Economist, Planning and Development Department, Government of
the Punjab. He has also served as Minister of Finance in the Government of Pakistan, and has
written a number of books, and journal and newspaper articles. He joined the World Bank in
1974 as a senior economist and went on to serve in several senior positions. He was the (first)
Director of the China Department (1987–94) and served as the Regional Vice-President for
Latin America and the Caribbean during 1994–99. He is currently the Chair of the Board of
Directors of the Shahid Javed Burki Institute of Public Policy at NetSol (BIPP) in Lahore.

Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is a career Bangladeshi diplomat and former Minister of Foreign
Affairs in the Government of Bangladesh (2007–08). He has a PhD in international relations
from the Australian National University, Canberra. He began his career as a member of the
civil service of Pakistan in 1969. Dr Chowdhury has held senior diplomatic positions in the
course of his career, including as Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the United
Nations in New York (2001–07) and in Geneva (1996–2001), and was ambassador to Qatar,
Chile, Peru and the Vatican. He is currently a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of
South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

Asad Ejaz Butt is an economist trained in Canada. He’s currently the Director off the Burki Institute of Public Policy in Lahore. Before joining BIPP, Mr. Ejaz was member of the Economics faculty at the University of Central Punjab. He’s also taken a number of consultancy assignments, most notably working with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on its SDGs agenda for the province of Punjab and with ICF International, Canada on its energy efficiency and policy analytics division.