Prof. Mahbubani to inaugurate Eminent Speaker series at Miloda Academy today

Internationally-acclaimed expert on Asian and world affairs Professor Kishore Mahbubani will inaugurate the Eminent Speaker series today at the Miloda Academy of Financial Studies, the training centre of the Ministry of Finance and Planning.

Professor Mahbubani’s lecture at Miloda Academy of Financial Studies is scheduled for today, 15 May, at 4 p.m. and is titled ‘Sri Lanka’s potential in the new Asian hemisphere’.

A Memorandum of Understanding will also be signed between the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore and the Ministry of Finance and Planning Sri Lanka to strengthen mutual cooperation on capacity development.

Professor Mahbubani is Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Previously he served for over three decades in the Singapore diplomatic service including as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN. He also served as President of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and in May 2002.

In addition to his career in the diplomatic services, Professor Mahbubani has also spoken and published globally. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine, the Washington Quarterly, Time, Newsweek, the Financial Times and the New York Times. He has also been profiled in the Economist and Time magazine.

Listed as a top global thinker in various journals, in his latest book ‘The Great Convergence,’ Professor Mahbubani argues that with the rise of a new Asian middle class, the world is rapidly approaching an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values; “in other words, a genuinely global civilisation.”

Some of the influential books Professor Mahbubani has authored include ‘Can Asians Think?’ (published and translated in Singapore, Canada, US, Mexico, India, China, Myanmar, Turkey and Malaysia), ‘Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World’ (published and translated in the US and China) and ‘The New Asian Hemisphere: The irresistible shift of global power to the East’ (published and translated in the US, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Italy, Taiwan and Vietnam).

In recognition of Professor Mahbubani’s achievements and contribution to society, the Singapore Government conferred him The Public Administration Medal (Gold) in 1988. He was also listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in 2005 and included in the March 2009 Financial Times list of Top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism – a list that included US President Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and former French President Sarkozy. Most recently Professor Mahbubani was selected as Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers in 2010 and 2011. In 2011 he was also described as ‘the muse of the Asian century’.

The Miloda Academy of Financial Studies, which is a state-of-the-art training facility, was established to improve the quality of the human resources of the Ministry of Finance, the revenue collecting and other key agencies of the Sri Lanka, to upgrade the quality of public sector employees who are in the forefront of policy formulation and execution.

The academy is expected to energise the knowledge building process as a regional hub that imparts knowledge to ministries of finance in the region, as a member of a network of learning centres of international repute in the region. Discussions are under way to firm up support from multilateral and bilateral agencies and academic institutions of repute towards developing a network in knowledge dissemination. The Eminent Speaker series will serve as a platform for knowledge sharing from experts around the world.