Jan Å vejnar

January Svejnar ( born October 2, 1952 in Prague ) is a Czech- American economist.

Life

Svejnar was in 1970, during the period of so-called normalization after the Prague Spring, with his parents first to exile in Geneva. In 1981, he applied for U.S. citizenship. His Czechoslovak citizenship withdrawn with the leave, but returned after the political changes in Eastern Europe. Svejnar has been married since 1979 with the economist Katherine Terrell, with whom he has a son and a daughter.

Training

Later, he traveled alone to the USA, where he studied at Cornell University in Ithaca economics. In 1974 he finished his studies here with the completion of a bachelor. At Princeton University, he continued his studies and reached here in 1976 a Master's degree. After he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University (1979 ), but worked in this period to 1983 as a research associate at Cornell University.

Career

In the 1980s, Svejnar worked in various international economic organizations, so from 1983 to 1984 at the OECD in Paris. Since 1984 he has worked as a consultant to the World Bank. At the same time, however, he continued his teaching at Cornell University also continued after 1983 until 1987 he was professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1990 he returned to Czechoslovakia back as part of a mission of the World Bank.

He advised the President Václav Havel, the Czech Prime Minister Vladimír Špidla and other politicians on economic issues. From 1990 to 1994 he was a board member of the American -Czechoslovak Education Fund ( ACSEF ). Since 1991 he is Chairman of the Center for Economic Research and postgraduate training at the Charles University in Prague. In the meantime, he was Head of the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Since 1996, Svejnar professor at the University of Michigan. From 1999 to 2003 he was a director of GE Capital Bank and since 2003 has been Chairman of the Czech private bank ČSOB. He is also a board member of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and consultants since 2006 the Hungarian and Turkish governments on economic issues.

Policy

In December 2007, he announced his candidacy for the presidential election in the country. In connection with this he put his activities as Supervisory Board in the private sector on ice. His candidacy was supported by the Czech Social Democrats and the Greens. In the third round of the election Svejnar was beaten on 15 February 2008 by his opponent, incumbent Václav Klaus with. Neither in the first election, which took place on February 8, nor in the subsequent round of voting could previously unite the required majority of the votes of the candidates.