Our Contributors

Andrés Velasco, a former presidential candidate and finance minister of Chile, is Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of numerous books and papers on international economics and development, and has served on the faculty at Harvard, Columbia, and New York Universities. 

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 party and Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. 

Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister, is President of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group (ALDE) in the European Parliament and the author of Europe’s Last Chance: Why the European States Must Form a More Perfect Union.

Xavier Vives, Professor of Economics and Finance at IESE Business School, is the co-author (with Patrick Bolton, Harrison Hong, and Marcin Kacperczyk) of the report Resilience of the Financial System to Natural Disasters.

Álvaro de Vasconcelos is Director of Projects for the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI), a consortium of 16 think tanks in the Arab world and the West, and coordinator of the Global Governance Group (GG 10). He was formerly Director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies, Paris, and the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (IEEI) in Lisbon.

Mabel van Oranje, a former CEO of The Elders, is Co-Founder of Girls Not Brides.

Rick van der Ploeg is Professor of Economics and Research Director of the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource-Rich Economies at the University of Oxford.

Huw van Steenis, a former senior adviser to Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, is Chair of Sustainable Finance at UBS and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Financial and Monetary Systems.

Cobus van Staden is a senior foreign policy researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs.

Ulrich Volz, Director of the SOAS Centre for Sustainable Finance and Reader in Economics at SOAS, University of London, is Senior Research Fellow at the German Development Institute.

Antonio Vitorino is a former Portuguese EU Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs.

Vaira Vike-Freiberga is a former president of Latvia.

Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age, is EU Commissioner for Competition.

Ursula von der Leyen is President of the European Commission.

Jeroen van der Veer, Chief Executive of Royal Dutch Shell plc, is Energy Community leader of the World Economic Forum energy industry partnership in 2007-2008 and this year's chairman of the Energy Summit in Davos. He also chairs the Energy and Climate Change working group of the European Round Table of Industrialists.