Professional Experience
Dr. Timberg has more than 40 years of experience concerning issues of economic and social development. He has been particularly associated with work on investment climate and regulatory reform. He was engaged as Team Leader/Senior Adviser and Access to Finance Specialist for the Project Management Unit for the World Bank supported Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Project in Nigeria with components concerned with access to finance, business development services, investment climate, and public private dialogue. The investment climate element of this project included work on credit bureaus, differing sorts of collateral, and bank supervision reform. The Access to Finance Component has underwritten extensive technical assistance to commercial microfinance institutions in Nigeria. From 1999 to 2003 Dr. Timberg served as Small Credit Adviser to the central bank of Indonesia helping it develop a post crisis, market friendly approach to small and microfinance. In this connection he provided advice on a wide range of financial supervision as well as worked with various ministries on investment climate issues including investment property rights protection, black money regulation, licensing and business registration, taxation issues and proposals for government subsidies and preferences.. From 1997 to 1999, he headed the Center for Economic Policy Reform in Armenia concerned with a broad range of policy including assisting with WTO entry, the revision of the civil code, reforms in customs administration, improving macroeconomic policy, sectoral development efforts in information technology, and policy toward the informal sector. He assisted the Antimonopoly Committees in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Jamaica and to a lesser extent in the Ukraine with developing their competition policies and administration.
In Bangladesh, he has done numerous and varied assignments starting with a role as Adviser to the Studies in Rural Industrial Development Project of the World Bank in 1982-4, following that he served as Adviser to USAID on its SME development programs. He then participated in an evaluation of the Rural Electrification Program in 1985. During his tenure as director of the ARIES Project (1985-1990) he was associated with studies of the informal financial sector directed by the Asian Development Bank and with an evaluation of the Swarnirbar Program. Since that time he has participated in evaluations of USAID’s Policy Reform Program, UNCDF’s Country Program, and a proposed involvement in the Credit Market by the World Bank. In 2004, he headed a team for the final evaluation of CARE Bangladesh’s Integrated Food Security Program, and in 2005, a team which did a case study for USAID of Integrity in Bangladesh’s Rural Electrification Program. He speaks and reads Bengali.
From 1985 to 1990, he lead the ARIES (Assistance to Resource Institutions for Enterprise Support) Project, USAID’s worldwide support project for small and microenterprise and finance development which worked in 35 different countries. Dr. Timberg has lectured and published widely on questions connected with economic and financial development and small and microfinance and enterprise development. He has a broad range of consulting experience as indicated below. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Independent Consultant 2008- assignments include:
Team Leader, Bosnia Microfinance Survey and Assessment, Nathan Associates, for International Finance Corporation, July-December 2013.
Adviser, Monitoring and Evaluation, Nathan Associates London, Islamic Corporation for Private Sector Development, 2012.
Team Leader, Assessment of Sharia Finance as a Means of Access to Finance for SME, Indonesia, for Egen Ltd, Bangladesh for World Bank, 2011-2012.
Since 2011 Dr. Timberg has worked as a researcher, lecturer, writer, and consultant. Most of the detail is in his Bibliography available on this web page. Many of the publications and the lecture overheads are in the Publications attached to this web page.
Mozambique Finance for SME for Nathan Associates 2013.
Other assignments have been for private clients.