Donald R. Sherk

Dr. Sherk has combined a career in international trade, investment and developmental policy working in major international development institutions (AsDB, AfDB, OECD). While working for the U.S. Department of Treasury he held appointive positions as the U.S. Executive Director to the African Development Bank, the U.S. Alternate Director to the Asian Development Bank and for a brief period he represented to United States on the Board of the Inter-American Development Bank.   In addition he has had a multifaceted academic career and has worked in a variety of private sector positions. He has specialized in development policy strategies, project finance, regional trade and investment patterns in Africa and the Asia/Pacific area and multilateral economic policy formation.  He has served on a number of international advisory bodies dealing with the multilateral development banks and has undertaken extensive training programs in macro-economic fields in several developing countries.

SPECIFIC PACIFIC ISLAND EXPERIENCE

Dr. Sherk has had considerable experience in dealing with South Pacific development problems and opportunities. Beginning as a graduate student he wrote a Masters Thesis on foreign investment in Australia while a Fulbright Scholar in Canberra, Australia. After finishing his PhD at the University of Iowa and teaching for a number of years in Boston, Massachusetts, he returned to the Pacific as a staff economist for the Asian Development Bank.  As a member of the South Pacific Division of the ADB he was involved in formulating economic policy papers and project development for the South Pacific members of the Bank. He wrote of the first economic  country program papers for the Fiji Islands. This required a thorough understanding of the different conditions impacting on South Pacific economies that were unique to the region. Specific aspects dealt with in the  Fijian economic report, were labor and management issues, export diversification opportunities, foreign  investment and tourism trends and income distribution aspects of Fijian development. He was also in charge of a pre-appraisal of a transport project for Kiribati.   Here he examined the catalytic effect of closer integration among the islands making up the very wide-spread island chain. Six years later, he returned to the Asian Development Bank representing the United States  on the board of executive directors. He worked within the Bank to enlarge the share  of the Bank’s resources that were earmarked for the South Pacific region and promoted the idea of establishing an ADB regional office in the South Pacific.

Corruption in Africa: Reflections on Nigeria, by Donald Sherk is available for downloading, in Adobe *.pdf format, by clicking on the title.