Atlantic Council

Biography

Albert Keidel

Albert Keidel is a development economist specializing in East Asia, with a focus on China.  He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an adjunct graduate professor in the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, where he teaches the Chinese economy. He previously was in the U.S. Treasury Department as Acting Director and Deputy Director of the Office of East Asian Nations, and before that as Treasury’s China Desk Officer.  Before joining Treasury in 2001, he covered China economic trends, system reforms, poverty, and country risk as a fixed-term Senior Economist in the World Bank office in Beijing (1997-2000).  Thanks to a generous two-year private foundation grant, his current project is a book on China’s economic evolution during and after the 2008-09 global economic crisis.

He has worked in China, Japan, and Korea and has taught graduate economics courses on China, Japan and development economics, including over the past 20 years at John Hopkins University SAIS, Georgetown University, and George Washington University. He began his Chinese language study after college, while teaching German and French for two years at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He has strong Chinese (Mandarin) language skills and works in China without an interpreter.

He received a BA in International Affairs from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, with a post-doctoral fellowship year in the Faculty of Economics at Tokyo National University (using the Japanese language).  At Princeton he won the Woodrow Wilson School’s Larking prize for the best senior thesis in Economics, writing about the 1960s crisis in the European Coal and Steel Community, based on summer field research in Luxemburg, Belgium, France and Germany funded by a travel grant from the McConnell Foundation.

Past work has covered China’s macroeconomic trends and cycles, its statistical system, measures of GDP (both official and PPP), poverty and regional inequality, balance of payments and exchange rate issues, local fiscal conditions, rural economic developments, including animal husbandry and grassland degradation issues, and, for the U.S. Treasury Department, a wide range of both fundamental and short-term bilateral U.S.-China issues. 

In addition to numerous conference papers and speaking engagements, he recently published a peer-reviewed paper on China’s exchange rate controversy (in Eurasian Geography and Economy, June 2011) and before that a peer-reviewed paper on China’s regional disparities in income and consumption (The Review of Income and Wealth, July 2009). His most recent European event was a presentation on the future of the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency, presented at a June 2011 London conference on the internationalization of the yuan.