Robert Dohner recently completed a career of twenty years at the US Department of the Treasury, where he served in five successive administrations. His last position was as deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis and senior Asia advisor, where he provided advice on the global economic outlook, on emerging economic issues, and on strategic direction for international affairs at Treasury. Previously, he was deputy assistant secretary for Asia, responsible for the region extending from Pakistan and India through China, Korea, and Japan, and supervising over twenty professionals, including six overseas Treasury attachés.

He helped establish and played a key role in the Strategic Economic Dialogue with China (under the Bush Administration) and the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with China (Obama Administration), where he helped define US government negotiating objectives across twenty US Departments and agencies, and he negotiated macroeconomic reforms and financial sector openings with the Chinese government. He also helped develop Treasury’s Financial and Economic Dialogue with India. He played a central role, working with Congress, in US economic reengagement with Myanmar and the revision of legislation that had blocked US engagement with Myanmar. He represented Treasury as the US Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Finance Ministers Deputy and as the US Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Finance Ministers Deputy.

Dohner was Treasury’s representative in Japan from 1997 to 2002, directing an office of five people that was instrumental in shaping Treasury and US Government policy towards Japan through Japan’s financial upheaval and prolonged recession. He also shaped Treasury’s discussions with Japanese authorities during the implementation of Big Bang financial liberalization, and negotiated on issues that included securities investor protection, the modification of firewall rules to allow global risk management, and the introduction of the Financial Services Agency (FSA) no-action letter process. Prior to his work on Japan, he was director of Treasury’s Office of Central and Eastern Europe, where he negotiated the winding up and release of funds from the Polish Bank Privatization Fund with the Polish Ministry of Finance. Before joining Treasury, Dohner was a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers on international trade issues, a principal economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) working on Eastern Europe, and senior economic adviser to the undersecretary of state for economic and agricultural affairs during the first Bush Administration.

He was a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a visiting professor at the Stanford Business School, and worked at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in Geneva. Robert Dohner began his career in international finance working for the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a Henry Luce Scholar. He has a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.