Hilton L. Root
Professor of Public Policy

hroot2@gmu.edu
George Mason School of Public Policy
3401 Fairfax Drive– MS 3B1
Arlington, VA 22201

Personal Page :
http://mason.gmu.edu/~hroot2

Education
1985 Mellon Post Doctoral Program in Social Sciences
Humanities and Social Science Division
California Institute of Technology

1983 University of Michigan, 1983
Ph.D., Economics & History

1980 Université de Dijon, France
Diplôme d’Etudes Avancées, Politics & Law

1977 University of Michigan
Masters, Economics & History

1974 State University of New York at Buffalo, Economics

Biography
Dr. Hilton Root, an academic and policy specialist in international political economy and development, is joining the faculty of the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in summer of 2006. He was Freeman Fellow and Visiting Professor of Economics at Pitzer College and Senior Fellow at Claremont Graduate University from June 2003 to June 2006. He served the current administration as US Executive Director Designate of the Asian Development Bank, and as senior advisor on development finance to the Department of the Treasury. Dr. Root was Director and Senior Fellow of Global Studies at the Milken Institute and was a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Economic Growth and Democracy at the Hoover Institution. His areas of expertise are international economics, economic development and policy reform, and Asian affairs.

As a policy expert, Dr. Root advises the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the OECD, the US State Department, the US Treasury Department and USAID. He has completed projects in 23 countries. The analytical framework he contributed to the World Bank’s Asian Miracle study, 1993, was part of the effort to put institutions on the development agenda. While at the ADB as chief advisor on governance, he was the principal author of the ADB’s Board-approved governance policy. He presided over a committee on governance indicators at the OECD and initiated the restructuring of the Sri Lanka civil service as an advisor to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. He was one of the principal contributors to the design of the Millenium Challenge Account of the Bush administration.

As an academic, he has taught at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Root has written and lectured extensively, publishing six books and more than 100 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He has published and presented in both the English and the French languages and has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

He has been awarded honors for The Key to the East Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible (with J. Edgardo Campos), which won the 1997 Charles H. Levine Award for best book of the year by the International Political Science Association. The Social Sciences History Association awarded him the 1995 best book prize of its Economic History Section for The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. From the American Historical Association he received the Chester Higby Prize, 1986, for the best article among those published during the previous two years. He is on the board of a number of organizations and journals including the Open Society Institute, Center for Public Integrity and Review of Pacific Basin Markets and Policies. Dr. Root received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1983.

Areas of Expertise

• International Economics and Finance, International Economic Policy, Foreign Affairs
• International development
• Developing nations
• Political economy of the design and implementation of development policy
• Economic policy reform
• North-South relations
• Asian-Pacific affairs

 

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