Kemal Derviş

Kemal Derviş

Kemal Derviş (born January 10, 1949 in Istanbul ) is a Turkish economist and politician. He was the Turkish Minister of Economic Affairs and worked in a leading position in various United Nations bodies .

Life

Kemal is the son of a Turkish father and a German mother. He spent part of his youth in Geneva . He grew up speaking four languages, including Turkish, German, French and English. Although he is a Muslim, he attended the Saint-Martin de France Catholic school in Pontoise .

After leaving school, he completed a college education at the London School of Economics and at the Princeton University , he aged 24 years with the promotion graduated. From 1973 to 1976 he was a member of the economics faculty at the Technical University of the Middle East . During this time he worked as an advisor to Bülent Ecevit during and after his tenure as Prime Minister. From 1976 to 1978 he was a member of the economics faculty at Princeton University.

In 1977 he joined the World Bank in Washington. He stayed in Washington for 24 years; got married there in their second marriage, after a first marriage that had resulted in two children. At the World Bank, he advanced to various leading positions. He became head of the Maghreb Department , then Chief Economist for the Middle East , and finally Director of Central Europe. In 1996 he was appointed Vice President of the World Bank.

On March 3, 2001, he followed an appointment by Bülent Ecevit , again Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey , to his cabinet . Turkey was in an economic crisis; In this difficult situation, Ecevit entrusted the office of Minister of Economics to Derviş, whom he had come to appreciate in earlier years as an advisor. Derviş initiated a rescheduling program, obtained aid loans of up to 23.5 billion US dollars (2002) for Turkey and the World Bank from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) , closed over-indebted banks and provided capital grants for banks that could be restructured. In 2002 Turkish economic growth was again 8%. To his own regret, however, he made no progress in integrating Turkey into the European Union , a goal he hoped to achieve "before I am too old".

When the Ecevit government collapsed in the summer of 2002, he resigned as a non-party minister together with his former ministerial colleagues from Ecevit's Democratic Left Party (DSP), İsmail Cem and Hüsamettin Özkan , on August 10, 2002. Initially, he participated in their efforts to found the New Turkey Party (YTP), but then joined the social democratic Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP). For this he was elected to the Turkish parliament in the November 2002 election.

In 2005 he returned to the international stage. He was appointed by the United Nations as director of its development program UNDP . He held this office until April 2009. He caused a sensation with a speech in March 2008 in Mumbai , in which he predicted a looming global financial crisis and in which he attested to the “market fundamentalists” that they were once again displaying an “irrational exuberance” that was already evident in the 1997 Asian crisis , the internet bubble of 2001 and the subprime crisis of 2007. He denounced that the "super-bankers, the new barons of finance capitalism, greedy for instant profits" would pass their losses on to the community.

In March 2009, Kemal Derviş was appointed as an economist at the US think tank Brookings Institution . From April 2009 to November 2017 he was also its Vice President. From 2009 to 2015, he also taught a course on international regulatory policy as an associate professor at Columbia University .

literature

• Philippe Bolopion: Economiste de crise . Le Monde , June 2, 2009, p. 17.

Web links

• Kemal Derviş's page at the Brookings Institution

Individual evidence

1. ^ "Avant d'être trop vieux", quoted from Philippe Bolopion: Economiste de crise . Le Monde , June 2, 2009, p. 17.
2. ↑ Philippe Bolopion: Economiste de crise . Le Monde , June 2, 2009, p. 17.