The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a massive policy response. Central banks and governments have worked closely, unleashing counter-cyclical policies of unprecedented scale and speed in 2020-21. For the first time in modern economic history, such policies have worked not only in advanced countries, but also in emerging markets. How have central banks in small open emerging markets achieved this success?

What policy toolkit have they used? What have been the “spillovers” from advanced country policies, including currency swaps from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB)? How will an eventual policy tightening work in emerging markets? This lecture by economist and Governor of the Bank of Albania Gent Sejko will examine these questions, focussing on small open economies in South-Eastern Europe.

Meet our speakers and chair

Piroska Nagy-Mohácsi is Visiting Professor in Practice at LSE's Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and Partner at the Macroeconomic Advisory Group (MAG). She was Programme Director at LSE's Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) between 2015 and 2021. Prior to that she was Director for Policy at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and worked in senior positions in the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Ricardo Reis (@R2Rsquared) is the A.W. Phillips Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and directs the ESRC Centre for Macroeconomics in the UK. Previously he was assistant professor at Princeton University, and a professor at Columbia University. He is an academic consultant at the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve system.

Gent Sejko is the Governor of the Bank of Albania and Chairman of its Supervisory Council as of February 2015. He graduated from the Faculty of Economics, University of Tirana, in 1991, in industrial economics, and earned a Master's degree in International Accounting and Financial Management (MAcc) from the University of Glasgow in 1997. He started his banking career in 1992 & has also worked for Deloitte & Touche, the American Bank of Albania, Raiffeisen Bank and "Société Générale Albania".

Vassilis Monastiriotis is an economist and economic geographer by training, specialising in the areas of Labour Economics, Economic Geography and Political Economy. He is an Associate Professor in Political Economy, a Member of the Hellenic Observatory, LSE and Director of LSEE: Research on South Eastern Europe.

More about this event

LSEE (@LSEE_LSE) was officially launched at the start of the 2009-10 academic year as a research unit established within LSE's European Institute. Over the last several years LSEE has developed the School's expertise on South East Europe, drawing on the strength of existing and new academic expertise at the LSE.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPostCOVID

Following the event, Gent Sejko wrote a blog post titled How Albania’s central bank dealt successfully with the COVID crisis for the LSE COVID 19 Blog.