Lex Rieffel is a nonresident senior fellow with Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. He is currently working on policy studies related to Southeast Asia, emerging markets finance, and reform of the IMF and World Bank.

He published an edited volume, entitled Myanmar/Burma: Inside Challenges, Outside Interests (Brookings, 2010), that examined Myanmar primarily through the eyes of its ASEAN partners, its superpower neighbors China and India, and its own people. It provided insights into the overarching problem of national reconciliation, the strategic competition between China and India, the role of ASEAN, and the underperforming, resource-cursed economy.

In 2007, he published a policy study, co-authored with Jaleswari Pramodhawardani, focusing on military reform in Indonesia: Out of Business and On Budget:The Challenge of Military Financing in Indonesia. His essay on the remarkable political and economic transitions in Indonesia in 2004 was published in the September-October 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs. He joined Brookings in 2002 to write Sovereign Debt Restructuring: the Case for Ad Hoc Machinery (September 2003).

Policy briefs presenting the findings of other research undertaken at Brookings focused on international volunteering, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Nigeria's Paris Club debt problem. Between 2001 and 2009, Mr. Rieffel taught a graduate seminar on "Financial Issues in Emerging Market Countries" at (successively) Johns Hopkins University-SAIS, Syracuse University-Maxwell School, and George Washington University-Elliott School.

From April 1994 to June 2001, Mr. Rieffel was employed by the Institute of International Finance as senior advisor and director of the Multilateral Policy department. Immediately prior to joining the IIF, he was a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. From 1975 to 1992, he served on the international staff of the U.S. Treasury Department. His final assignment was directing the Office of Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Policy. Earlier, he had external assignments with the offices of the U.S. ambassador to the OECD and the U.S. executive director of the IMF.

Mr. Rieffel was an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Indonesia; a planning analyst at the International Paper Company (in New York City); a volunteer with the U/S/ Peace Corps (in India); and an officer in the U.S. Navy (in Vietnam). He is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A., economics) and the Fletcher School, Tufts University (M.A.L.D., International Development Studies).

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