Bulletin

Issue: November/December 2006

News

Focus on world finance

About 500 leading finance professionals, educators, and policy makers from more than 65 countries will gather in Melbourne next April when La Trobe University hosts the 14th Annual Global Finance Conference - the first ever held in the southern hemisphere.

Billed as the world’s ‘premier finance conference’, it has met annually since the early 1990s to debate and exchange ideas to advance education, learning and practice in global finance. Keynote addresses by Nobel Prize winners are a regular feature of the conference.

For the first time, the 2007 conference will offer a Mandarin language session, deal with interest-free banking and Islamic finance and provide an enhanced legal and regulatory stream. The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute has accredited the conference for professional development credits for its members world-wide.

The conference will be opened by former Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, Mike Moore, above, now an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University. Conference organiser, Head of La Trobe’s Law School, Professor Gordon Walker said conference sessions will cover some 24 subject areas over four days from 1 April. These range from banking, insurance, multinational finance, interest rates, corporate governance, financial crises management to currency issues, emerging markets, privatisation, ethics and social responsibility.

Professor Walker said the best papers from the enhanced legal and regulatory session will be published in a special conference edition of ‘Law in Context’, the legal journal of the La Trobe Law School.

The conference is being held under the auspices of the Global Finance Association which solicits innovative ideas and research studies in global finance and related disciplines. Previous conferences have been held in the US, Canada, Germany, China, Turkey, Mexico, Ireland and Brazil.