Sponsor of the 9th UNESCO Sound Week Professor, writer, honorary Conseiller d’Etat, special advisor to the French President from 1981 to 1991, founder and first Chairman of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1993, Jacques Attali (www.attali.com) is now Chairman of A&A, an international consulting firm (www.attali-associes.com) specializing in new technologies, based in Paris, and Chairman of PlaNet Finance (www.planetfinance.org), an International Solidarity Organization specializing in the development of microfinance. PlaNet Finance is the world’s largest microfinance support institution. It advises and finances the development of microfinance in 80 countries. In 1980, he founded Action Contre la Faim, and in 1984 launched the European Eureka program (a vast program on new technologies which gave rise, among other things, to the MP3). In 1989, he launched an international action program against the catastrophic floods in Bangladesh. Jacques Attali then advised the Secretary General of the United Nations on the risks of nuclear proliferation. He is the driving force behind the reform of higher education to harmonize European degrees, known as LMD. Jacques Attali holds a doctorate in economics and is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique (class of 1963), the Ecole des Mines, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and the Ecole Nationale de l’Administration. He has taught theoretical economics at Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and Université Paris-Dauphine. He holds honorary doctorates from several foreign universities and is a member of the Académie Universelle des Cultures. Jacques Attali is also an editorial writer for L’Express. He is the author of fifty-five books, translated into over twenty languages and selling over eight million copies worldwide, including essays (on subjects ranging from mathematical economics to music), biographies, novels, children’s stories, biographies and plays. Jacques ATTALI was appointed Chairman of the Commission for the Liberation of French Growth by the French President on August 30, 2007. According to Foreign Policy magazine (May/June 2008), Jacques Attali is “one of the hundred most important intellectuals in the world”.
