Hans Holzhacker is Chief Economist at the CAREC Institute. Before joining the CAREC Institute, he was for two years Lead economist for Central Asia with the EBRD, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Hans was chief economist at Golomt Bank in Mongolia and ATFBank in Kazakhstan. He was also teaching at the Turan and Narxoz universities in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Earlier, he was a Vienna-based economist at several banks, focusing mostly on countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He was also Senior Economist at the Institute of International Finance in Washington D.C. Hans holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a MA in Economics from the University of Vienna. He completed a postgraduate scholarship at the Economics Department of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna.