Biography:

• Salah El Serafy is an international economic consultant who holds two first degrees, one in business from Alexandria University (B. Com.) and the other in economics from the University of London (B. Sc. Econ.) and also a doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford.
• He served as a professor of economics at the faculty of Commerce, Alexandria University, and as a Fulbright post-doctoral Research Fellow in the department of Economics at Harvard University.
• Subsequently, as Project Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), London, he conducted economic research for eight years on a broad front of issues that involved field studies in developed and developing countries.
• He subsequently spent twenty years at the World Bank, Washington DC, as a Senior Economist, Adviser and Senior Adviser, working largely in central departments on macroeconomic policy issues with numerous field assignments.
• At the Bank he helped to develop methods for cost-benefit analysis; the design and implementation of structural Adjustment operations in cooperation with the IMF; and initiated the drive to cover environmental concerns in World Bank country assistance strategies.
• He chaired two World Bank/UNEP international workshops in the 1980s for ?greening? the United Nations system of national accounts (SNA), and participated in the conferences that led to the publication of the 1993 SNA. Currently he is working on a book on Macroeconomics and the Environment.
• On retiring from the World Bank in 1992, Salah El Serafy was appointed leader of the World Bank?s team for the ex post evaluation of the Global Environment Facility (Pilot Phase). This culminated in a joint report by the World Bank, UNEP and UNDP which was published in 1994.
• He subsequently acted as a consultant to several national and international bodies on environmental economic matters; lectured on the interface between economics and the environment at various universities and think tanks; and served on the Editorial Boards of Ecological Economics and Environmental Taxation and Accounting.
• Working intermittently as a special consultant to UNEP he took part in reviewing draft revisions of the United Nations Statistical Department?s guidelines for the Satellite Accounts which the 1993 SNA had introduced, with the view of ?integrating? the economic and environmental accounts.
• Salah El Serafy?s publications include the ?Proper Calculation of Income from Depletable Natural Resources?, which was published by the World Bank jointly with UNEP in 1989 in Environmental Accounting for Sustainable Development. This re-introduced the ?El Serafy Method? (first published in 1981 in the Journal of Energy and Development) as an instrument for reckoning sustainable income. A selected list of his publications follows.

Abstract: