Padma Desai is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University. A leading scholar of the Russian economy, she is the author of Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin, which was the Financial Times Pick of the Year in 2007, and coathor of Work Without Wages: Russia's Non-Payment Crisis (MIT Press). Her most recent book, on the current economic crisis, is From Financial Crisis to Global Recovery.