Professor Muhammad Yunus is
the founder of Micro Credit and
Grameen Bank, who won Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his
efforts to create economic and social development benefiting millions of poor
people around the world. Loans to poor people without any financial security was
an impossible idea, that he made it possible through his innovative micro credit
system and which has now successfully taken root into many economies around the
world. He is currently working on another innovative idea on “Social Business”,
which will be the theme of his keynote paper in this conference.
James Robinson is David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard
University and a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center for International
Affairs. Professor Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics,
the University of Warwick and Yale University. He previously taught in the
Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne, the University of
Southern California and before moving to Harvard was a Professor in the
Departments of Economics and Political Science at the University of California
at Berkeley. His main research interest is why countries are different:
particularly why some are more prosperous than others and why some are more
democratic than others. Professor Robinson is a member of the Canadian Institute
for Advanced Research's program on Institutions, Organizations and Growth.
