Lex Rieffel

Lex Rieffel is a nonresident fellow with the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center. Before that, he was a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings institution.

In 2007, he published a study, co-authored with Jaleswari Pramodhawardani, focusing on military reform in Indonesia: Out of Business and On Budget:The Challenge of Military Financing in Indonesia. His essay on the remarkable political and economic transitions in Indonesia in 2004 was published in the September-October 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.

He joined Brookings in 2002 to write Sovereign Debt Restructuring: the Case for Ad Hoc Machinery (September 2003), which remains the authoritative work on the process of sovereign debt restructuring.

Policy briefs presenting the findings of other research undertaken at Brookings focused on international volunteering, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Nigeria’s Paris Club debt problem and the roles of the IMF and World Bank. He is beginning to work in 2016 on a study of the role of volunteer service in programs to address the global challenge of urban youth unemployment.

From April 1994 to June 2001, Mr. Rieffel was employed by the Institute of International Finance as senior advisor and director of the Multilateral Policy Department. From 1975 to 1993, he served on the international staff of the U.S. Treasury Department.

His final assignment was directing the Office of Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union Policy. Earlier, he had external assignments in the offices of the U.S. ambassador to the OECD and the U.S. executive director of the IMF.

Earlier, Mr. Rieffel was an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development (in Indonesia); a planning analyst at the International Paper Company (in New York City); a volunteer with the U.S. Peace Corps (in India); and an officer in the U.S. Navy (in Vietnam). He is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A., economics) and the Fletcher School, Tufts University (M.A.L.D., International Development Studies).