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Caroline Brassard has been teaching Development Economics and Statistics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, at the National University of Singapore since 2002. She obtained a B.A. in Mathematics-Economics at the University of Montreal, an M.A. in Economics at the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She began her career as an economist for the Government of Ontario and quickly moved into the field of international development. Over the next 10 years, she under-took research and long-term consultancy work on poverty reduction strategies for several international non-governmental organisations, including UNICEF in Madagascar, CARE in Bangladesh and Save the Children in Vietnam. Caroline taught empirical analysis techniques for business and economics at the University of London, and obtained a professional accreditation for teaching in higher education. Her current research focuses on the impact of the transitional process towards a market economy in Vietnam, on income distribution, poverty and inequality and more recently, on the development strategy being implemented in Bhutan.

Sarthi Acharya is currently Director, Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur (India). He has earlier been on the faculty of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay. He has been a visiting scholar at Boston University in the US, the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, and the Agricultural University at Bogor (Indonesia). He has also been Research Director at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute, and Employment Specialist with the International Labour Organization. He has been a consultant with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UN-ESCAP, UNDP and the Mauritius Research Council as well as to various agencies of the Government of India. He has published extensively in academic and professional forums. His main areas of interest are labour and development studies.