UNU to Honour Founders at Silver
Anniversary Symposium Oct. 23

UNU headquarters in Tokyo, venue for the 25th anniversary symposium

UNU will celebrate its 25^th anniversary with an international symposium: UNU at 25: Reaching Out to Japan and the World, at UNU Center, Tokyo, Oct. 23, 3 p.m.

UNU will also mark the occasion by naming its main conference halls after two other key figures in the university’s creation – former UN Secretary General U Thant and Elisabeth Rose of America, whose vision and commitment was vital to UNU’s establishment. Mrs. Rose, now in her 90s, will join the celebration of UNU’s silver anniversary. Among other guest speakers: James Hester, UNU’s first Rector and Heitor Gurgulino De Souza, UNU’s third Rector.

Messages about UNU -- its role in the past, present and future, its accomplishments and areas for improvement -- are being requested for display during the Symposium and to help plan for the future. The Symposium will combine a review of UNU’s historical development and examine its current role and position

For more information: UNU Public Affairs, tel. (03) 5467-1243, -1246; fax (03) 3406-7346.

UNU Rector to lead International
Association of Universities

Hans van Ginkel

UNU Rector Hans van Ginkel has been elected to a four year term as President of the International Association of Universities.

Founded in 1950, the UNESCO-based IAU convenes institutions and organizations from 150 countries for reflection and action on common concerns and collaborates with international, regional and national bodies active in higher education.

Its services are available to organizations, institutions and authorities concerned with higher education, as well as to individual policy and decision makers, specialists, administrators, teachers, researchers and students.

IAU’s mission is based on four principles:

• the right to pursue knowledge for its own sake,

• to follow wherever the search for truth may lead,

• tolerance of divergent opinion, and

• freedom from political interference.

The Association also aims to give expression to the obligation of universities as social institutions to promote, through teaching and research, the principles of freedom and justice, of human dignity and solidarity, and contributes, through international cooperation, to the development of material and moral assistance for the strengthening of higher education in general.

UNU Stages Conference
on Value of Forests

For more information, visit the conference web site  or contact UNU Public Affairs, tel. (03) 5467-1243, -1246; fax (03) 3406-7346

Report on El Niño: Fix the
roof while the sun shines

NASA satellite photo of the 1997 El Niño  shows the large warm water mass off  the west coast of the Americas

UNU is among a group of UN agencies that, together with the US-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will release a new report this month that spells out lessons drawn from 16 countries during the “El Niño of the Century” in 1997-98.

The study looked at experiences in 16 countries -- Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji – and warns that thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars in economic damage will continue to befall the world’s developing countries every two to seven years until an investment is made to improve forecasting and preparedness against El Niño.

Financed by the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships, the study is scheduled for release in Washington DC Oct. 26 and will be online at http://www.esig.ucar.edu/un/. For more information contact Zafir Adeel.

Annual WIDER Lecture Focuses on
Globalization and  Governance

Jagdish Bhagwati

Noted economist Jagdish Bhagwati will speak about the need to devise  domestic and international policy frameworks to offset the negative effects of globalization when he gives the WIDER Annual Lecture Nov. 27.

Professor Bhagwati contends that globalization has come in for indiscriminate attack from critics who do not distinguish between different types of globalization (e.g. freer trade, freer capital flows, freer direct investment, and freer immigration) or between very different but often-confused questions such as: is globalization bypassing the poor or is it actually harming them. Arguing that, in the main, globalization has a human face, the Lecture will then focus on Appropriate Governance to devising domestic and international institutional policy frameworks to offset the downsides that define the few warts on that human face.

Jagdish Bhagwati is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics and of Political Science at Columbia University and the Andre Meyer Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. He was Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT and served as 
the Economic Policy Adviser to the Director General of GATT (1991-93).

Professor Bhagwati is a leading economist, best known for contributions to the theory of international trade policy. He also writes frequently on public policy in leading newspapers and magazines. He has received many Honorary Degrees and Prizes, among them the Bernhard Harms Prize (Germany), the Freedom Prize (Switzerland), the Seidman Distinguished Award for Political Economy (USA) and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal (India).

Click here to register for the lecture and reception.

Dr. José Luis Ramirez named
new Director of UNU/BIOLAC

Dr. José Luis Ramirez

Venezuelan geneticist Dr. José Luis Ramirez Ochoa has been appointed Director of the UNU's Programme for Biotechnology in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNU/BIOLAC).

Dr. Ramirez, 56, is a professor of Genetics at the Central University of Venezuela where he heads both the Department of Graduate Studies in Cell Biology and the Molecular Genetics Groups. He is a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University.

An expert on tropical diseases, Dr. Ramirez has published numerous papers on Leishmaniasis, Chaga's disease and other parasitic infections and serves as a high level Advisor and permanent collaborator of the Central American Network of Tropical Diseases.

Developing countries must 
invest in IT - new book 

The use of information technology (IT) is now so widely spread in the world economy that no country can ignore any longer the need to invest in these technologies if it wants to improve the standard of living of its citizens, according to a new book from UNU's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER).

In recent years, information technology has had a strong influence on economic growth in industrial countries and at least some newly industrialised countries. However, developing countries seem to have neither invested in IT not benefited from such investments to the same extent as industrial countries.

Investment in infrastructure, physical capital and education is an old policy prescription in the economics of development, says editor Marri Pohjola in his introduction to Technology, Productivity and Economic Growth: International Evidence and Implications for Economic Growth. What is new in the analyses presented in this book is the recommendation that the information technology component of these investments should be high.