He is currently the Senior Vice President and Director for Research Investor Investor Relations & Corporate Planning Group of the BDO Unibank, Inc. Dante joined BDO Unibank in 2016. He has over 25 years of experience in financial services. Dante has held Head of Research positions with BDO Trust & Investments, BDO Nomura Securities, Credit Suisse Securities, and Philippine Equity Partners. He has also served as Head of Investment Banking & Special Assets with Land Bank of the Philippines. Dante started his professional career in project development with ABB Energy Ventures in Princeton, New Jersey and was a member of Institutional Investor’s top ranked Asia Pacific Regional Utility and Energy research team from 1997-2002 as an analyst with Merrill Lynch. He holds an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ragnar Gudmundsson is currently the Philippines Resident Representative in the Asia Pacific Department of the IMF.Ragnar joined the International Monetary Fund in 1999. As the principal economist for Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic, he led discussions on budgetary policy and fiscal reform at the ministerial level, analysed and reviewed economic developments, and produced macroeconomic projections. He also presented research on post-conflict economics in the context of IMF publicationsand seminars.

In 2005, Ragnar served as Advisor to the Executive Director for France at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington DC. His area of expertise was Latin America. Between 2006 and 2008, Ragnar joined Landsbanki, as Director, International Banking Asia Pacific in Hong Kong. He was responsible for Landsbanki’s business development strategy in Asia. In 2009, Ragnar returned to the International Monetary Fund, African Department as Senior Economist and was appointed the IMF’s Resident Representative for Kenya in May 2010. He was appointed the IMF’s Resident Representative for the West Bank and Gaza in November 2014, a position he held until November 2017, when he became the Resident Representative for Bangladesh.

He returned to Headquarters in Washington in November 2020, joining the Macao SAR team as Mission Chief and the Vietnam team as Senior Economist. Prior to joining the IMF, Ragnar held various positions as Programme Specialist at UNESCO in Paris, France; Economic Advisor to the CEO of Thomson S.A. (now Thales)

in Paris, France; Economist, International and Research Departments of the Central Bank of Iceland, in Reykjavik; Consultant for UNDP’s Human Development Report. Ragnar was educated at the London School of Economics, Columbia University, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He holds a Ph.D in Economics.

Bernardo Malvar Villegas is a Visiting Professor of IESE Business School in Barcelona, Professor at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P), and Research Director of the Center for Research and Communication, Manila. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University (1963) and is a Certified Public Accountant, having been one of the CPA board topnotchers. He obtained Bachelor’s degrees in Commerce and the Humanities (both Summa Cum Laude) from De La Salle University. At Harvard, at the age of 21, he was one of the youngest ever to be a teaching fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.