Takatoshi Ito is an internationally renowned economist and expert on international finance, macroeconomics, and the Japanese economy. He served as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy from 2006 to 2008. He also held senior positions in the Japanese Ministry of Finance and at the International Monetary Fund.  Ito also served as Dean of the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Public Policy for the past two years and as a professor at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

Satoshi Shimizutani is an Executive Senior research Fellow at JICA Ogata Research Institute. Prior to the current position, he worked for the Japanese government and conducted economic research at several research institutes. His primary interest is empirical research with a focus on policy evaluation and his papers covered a wide variety of topics and some of them were published in Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Comparative Economics and Industrial and Labor Relations Review.