11:11 a.m., Feb. 2, 2010----The University of Delaware has been selected by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, to implement a $308,000 Title VIII grant program that will fund economics and business research by 12 American scholars on the continuing transition of Eastern Europe and Central Asia to a free-market economy.

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UD's Institute for Global Studies (IGS), in partnership with Jeffrey Miller, professor of economics in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, is administering the program, which is titled “Institutional Transition in the Emerging Market Economies of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.”

Miller serves as the program's academic director. This is the second Title VIII award he has won in collaboration with the IGS.

“Professor Miller's expertise in the economics of transition, and his knowledge of the Balkans and Caucasus region made UD an outstanding competitor for this program,” said Lesa Griffiths, associate provost for international programs. “We look forward to working with him again.”

“The project is important because it continues to enhance UD's visibility as a university actively engaged in the region,” Miller said. “It follows earlier projects to do economics and management training in Bulgaria in the early 1990s and more recently to establish an MBA program in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

The scholars are being selected through a national, merit-based, competitive fellowship program. Their research will focus on the free-market economic transition under way in one or more of these countries: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

A panel of distinguished economists, political scientists, and business professors, led by Miller, will make the final selections.

Recipients will interact with State Department officials in Eastern Europe and/or Central Asia, local government, university, and independent sector partners, including the University of Delaware's key partner in the Caucasus, the International School of Economics (ISET) at the Tbilisi State University in the Republic of Georgia.

“ISET is a new economics graduate program that is designed to improve the economic knowledge base in Caucasus,” Miller noted. “It follows the very successful New Economics School model. The New Economics School was established in Moscow in the 1990s to teach Western Economics in a country where Marxian economics had been taught in the past,” he said.

To disseminate the research, scholars who are writing about the Caucasus and Central Asia will present their findings at a conference in Washington, D.C., the proceedings of which will be distributed by UD, Miller said.

Article by Tracey Bryant