Member of the CASE Supervisory Council

Leszek Balcerowicz (born 1947). Member of the CASE Council since December 1992. Has  not participated in CASE statutory bodies since 1997, when he was appointed Vice-Premier and Minister of Finance. Due to his appointment on 22^nd December 2000 to the post of  President of the National Bank of Poland, Professor Leszek Balcerowicz resigned as Chairman of the Council of the Foundation and Advisory Council.

In 1970, he graduated with honours from the Foreign Trade Faculty of Warsaw's Main School of Planning and Statistics (SGPiS), now called SGH - the Main School Economics. In 1974 he received his MBA at St. John' s University in New York and in 1975, he defended his doctor's thesis at the SGPIS. In the years 1981-82, he was Deputy Chairman of the Polish Economic Society. In September 1989, Leszek Balcerowicz became Deputy Premier and Minister of Finance in the first non-communist government in Poland. Leszek Balcerowicz carried out the plan of rapid stabilisation and transformation of the Polish economy, generally known as the "Balcerowicz Plan". Thanks to these reforms, Poland slashed its hyperinflation and this was followed by a sudden increase in the competitiveness of Polish products and the country entered on a road of rapid economic growth. Balcerowicz fulfilled both these functions until December 1991.

In October 1992, he was given the position of Professor in Warsaw's Main School of Trade and a year later became Director of its Comparative International Studies Department. During the period of  April 1995 - December 2000 he was the Union of Freedom's (Unia Wolności) Party Chairman. Leszek Balcerowicz has been given scholarships to among others, the University of Sussex (1985) and Marburg University (1988). In 1992, he was distinguished with the prestigious Ludwik Erhard Prize awarded by the Ludwik Erhard Foundation. He was awarded the title Doctor Honoris Causa by the French University of Aix-en-Provence, the University of Sussex in Great Britain, the De Paul University of Chicago in USA, the Szczecin and Torun Universities, the Staffordshire University in England, the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland, and the J. Stern Economics University in Bratislava.

Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz has lectured at colleges all over the world, including Austria, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Japan, the Czech Republic, India, Italy, Ukraine, Lithuania and the USA. He is the author of numerous books and publications on economics and a member of the European Economic Association, the Polish Sociological Society and the Association of Polish Economists.

Since November 1997 and until June 2000, in the AWS-UW coalition government, Leszek Balcerowicz has again been fulfilling the function of Deputy Premier and Minister of Finance. In 1998, he received the award "Minister of Finance of the year 1998 awarded by "Euromoney". In 1999, he was honoured with the prize of the "Transatlantic Leadership Awards" for the most outstanding European of the year, awarded by the European Institute in Washington. In April 1999, the monthly periodical Business Central Europe awarded him the prize "Minister of Finance of 1998". In May 2000, he received the international Friedrich August von Hayek prize.