Profile

Dr. Karl P. Sauvant is the Founding Executive Director of the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and Co-Director, Millennium Cities Initiative. He is also Guest Professor at Nankai University, China.

Until July 2005, he was Director of UNCTAD's Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development, the focal point in the UN system for matters related to foreign direct investment (FDI) and technology, as well as a major interface with the private sector. While at the UN, he created (in 1991) the prestigious annual United Nations publication the World Investment Report, of which he was the lead author until 2005, and (in 1992) the journal Transnational Corporations, serving as its editor. He provided intellectual leadership and guidance to a series of 25 monographs on key issues related to international investment agreements (which were published in 200405 in three volumes), and he edited (together with John Dunning) a 20-volume Library on Transnational Corporations (published by Routledge).

Dr. Sauvant joined the United Nations in 1973 and, as of 1975, had focused his work on matters related to FDI. In 1988, he became responsible for the Organization's policy analysis work on FDI. In 2001, he became Director of DITE. His responsibilities included managing the Division; promoting international consensus-building in the areas of FDI, technology and enterprise development; providing intellectual leadership for policy-oriented research; and conceptualizing and supervising technical assistance activities in this field.

Apart from his work for the United Nations, he has published extensively on issues related to economic development, FDI and services. In addition, his name is associated with a great number of United Nations publications on FDI.

Dr. Sauvant received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, U.S.A. He is a national of Germany.