20th Karlsruhe Dialogues - Speakers

Prof. Dr. Lajos Bokros, born in 1954, is a Hungarian politician and economist. He studied at the Corvinus University of Budapest and wrote his dissertation on market developments in Central America. In the early 1990s, he was chairman and chief executive officer of both Budapest Bank and Budapest Stock Exchange. Between 1995 and 1996, Bokros was Hungarian Minister of Finance in the government of Gyula Horn, before he became the director for Private Sector and Finance at the World Bank from 1996 to 2004. He was a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014, and has been a teaching professor at the Departments of Public Policy and Economics at Central European University, Budapest, since 2004.

Recent publications include Origins of State Distortions in Transition Societies (2007), The Reconstruction of Institutional Democracy on the Ruins of Populism (2009), and Accidental Occidental. Economics and Culture of Transition in Mitteleuropa, the Baltic and the Balkan Area (2013).