Barry Herman is Visiting Senior Fellow at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of The New School in New York. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Global Integrity, a research NGO based in Washington
that works with independent scholars and investigative reporters on
assessing laws, institutions and practices to improve governance and
limit corruption in developed and developing countries. In addition, he
is Co-Chair of the Task Force on Debt Restructuring and Sovereign
Bankruptcy at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University.
He completed almost 30 years in the United Nations Secretariat in 2005,
the last two years of which were as Senior Advisor in the Financing for
Development Office in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs
(DESA). In that capacity, he was DESA’s team leader for two sets of
multi-stakeholder consultations encompassing governments, international
organizations, the private sector and civil society. The first, on
"Building Inclusive Financial Sectors for Development" (jointly with
the UN Capital Development Fund), led to the UN “Blue Book” of the same
title, a distillation of contrasting views and experiences to help
countries develop national strategies to build inclusive financial
sectors. The second was on "Sovereign Debt for Sustained
Development" (jointly with UNCTAD, International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank) focused on ways developing countries might better address
their debt in “good and bad times.” He
was part of the Secretariat team for the Monterrey Summit on Financing
for Development in 2002. Earlier, he led the team that produced the
UN’s annual World Economic and Social Survey. Before joining the UN
Secretariat in 1976, he taught development and international economics.
He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Chicago. His latest book, jointly edited with Christian Barry and Lydia Tomitova is Dealing Fairly with Developing Country Debt
(Blackwell Publishing, Boston), a collection of papers by philosophers,
theologians, lawyers and economists who participated in the “debt and
ethics” project at The New School and the Carnegie Council for Ethics
in International Affairs that he co-directed with Christian Barry.