Prof Akbar Zaidi appointed IBA executive director

The Sindh government on Monday appointed renowned economist Prof Dr Syed Akbar Zaidi as executive director of the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, for four years.

A notification issued in this regard by the universities and boards department read: “In exercise of the powers vested in him under the Section 9 (1) of the Business Administration Karachi Act 1994, the Chief Minister Sindh has appointed Prof Syed Akbar Zaidi as Executive Director of the IBA.”

As per the Independent Academia, an organisation that maintains a record of veteran and leading academics, Prof Zaidi earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2009. Earlier, he completed MPhil in economics at the same varsity in 1992-93 and MSc in social planning in developing countries from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1981-82. He acquired his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University College London in 1977-80.

Prof Zaidi has served as a visiting scholar in the Carnegie Endowment’s South Asia Program. He has also been a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His has carried out research on the development, governance, and political economy in South Asia.

The academic taught economics at the University of Karachi from 1983 to 1996 before becoming a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford in 1998. He was also a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for the Advanced Study of India in New Delhi in 2002–2003.

Between 2010 and 2015, Prof Zaidi served at the School of International Public Affairs, Columbia University, and the School of International Public Affairs, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) as a visiting professor.

Between 2004 and 2005, he taught at SAIS as a visiting professor. In 2008, he was a Reagan-Fascell Democracy fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Prof Zaidi has authored several books. His twelfth book, ‘Military, Civil Society and Democratisation in Pakistan’, was published by Vanguard Press, Lahore in October 2010. He has also written around 73 research papers that were published in various local and international journals.