Robert F. Conrad is an emeritus faculty member at Duke University where he was Director of the Duke Center for International Development. Among other positions, Dr. Conrad served as Director of the U.S. Treasury's Tax Advisory Program for Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. He has advised more than fifty countries on tax and natural resource policies over a forty-five-year career with the support of governments, international organizations, and private foundations. He has also advised private entities and international organizations. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Michael Alexeev is Professor of Economics at Indiana University in Bloomington. He received his PhD in Economics from Duke University in 1984. Previously he taught at George Mason University. His research interests lie mostly in the fields of institutional economics, taxation, fiscal federalism, resource economics, and the Russian economy. Prof. Alexeev's research has appeared in Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Economics and Statistics, and European Economic Review as well as in other prestigious general and field journals. He has also worked as a tax policy consultant in several developing countries and economies in transition.