Please note this event has been cancelled. The Adam Smith Institute are holiding a similar event on Jan 25th 2011. If you wish to attend, please click here.

How the West was Lost:  Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead is about unintended consequences – good policy intentions that yield bad (economic) outcomes. A surfeit of foreign aid transfers has contributed to rampant corruption and unsustainable debt burdens in the world’s poorest economies and even fuelled conflict across them.  Meanwhile, deliberate policy in rich economies has eroded capital, labour and productivity – the three key ingredients that drive economic growth. Over the past 50 years, a combination of various well-intentioned policies has put Western countries on a path to economic demise. Unless these are reversed they will sharply reduce living standards over the next few decades.

Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who comments on the macro-economy and global affairs. She was an economist at Goldman Sachs where she worked for nearly a decade, and was a consultant to the World Bank in Washington DC.  She is the author of the New York Times’ best-seller Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa. In 2009 Dambisa Moyo was named by Time Magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”, and was nominated to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum. Her writing regularly appears in economic and finance-related publications such as the Financial Times, the Economist Magazine and the Wall Street Journal.  She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters degree from Harvard University. She completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and an MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington DC.