My first experience as a teacher was in Saigon in 1963-64. It was an English conversation course in night school and it was a lot of fun. My next experience was in 1994, during the “sabbatical” year from the US Treasury Department that I spent at the Brookings Institution. I proposed to the
School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS–attached to Johns Hopkins University but located in Washington DC) teaching a course for second year graduate students on “Financial Sector Reform in Transition Countries” (these being the countries in East Europe and the Former Soviet Union transitioning to market economies). It was a rewarding experience. After I left the Institute of International Finance in 2001, I proposed to SAIS a variation of this course, “Emerging Markets Finance”, and taught it for just one semester there. This course was not so successful because, it seemed, of the cultural change from the pre-internet to the post-internet age. So I made some improvements and taught the course in eight other semesters in the following years for Syracuse University’s Maxwell School and George Washington University’s Elliott School. In the Fall of 2013, I went back to SAIS, this time to teach the seminar on Myanmar/Burma. My strangest teaching experience was a basic course on international finance for the start-up International Center of Excellence (ICOE) at Yangon University in the summers of 2013 and 2014. The ICOE imploded in 2015: a good object lesson in how foreign aid projects fail. In 2021, I taught twice an 8-week course on “The World of Economics and Finance” for the Continuing Education program of start-up Parami University in Myanmar.
My most recent teaching experience was a virtual course (8-weeks/15 classes) on “The World of Economics and Finance” offered by Parami University for students in Myanmar/Burma. These students were functioning at roughly the college freshman level in the USA. The course draws heavily on the graduate seminars I taught in Washington DC on emerging finance between 2001 and 2009. Click here to read.
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