1926–2016
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn
Economist, Club of Rome member
An economist and public figure who was born in the Ternopil region and lived and worked in Canada and Switzerland. For 18 years he headed the International Management Institute in Geneva, and after 1991 he helped build independent Ukraine.
Key accomplishments
- Director of the International Management Institute in Geneva (1968–1986)
- Report to the Club of Rome, Road Maps to the Future (1980)
- Chair of the Consultative Advisory Council to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (1991–1998)
- Co-founder of the International Management Institute in Kyiv
Who he was
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn was born in 1926 in the village of Koropets in the Ternopil region. In 1943 he was taken to Germany for forced labor. From 1947 he lived in Canada, where he earned a master’s degree at the University of Toronto in 1954, and from 1960 in Switzerland. So he was Ukrainian-born and spent most of his life in the diaspora, and from the late 1980s he worked for Ukraine again.
His story
In 1958 Hawrylyshyn graduated from the International Management Institute in Geneva, and from 1960 he worked there; in 1968–1986 he was its director. In 1990 the institute merged with the IMEDE school, and this created the IMD business school in Lausanne. In 1976 he earned a PhD in economics at the University of Geneva.
Hawrylyshyn was a member of the Club of Rome, an international association of scientists and public figures who study the global problems of humankind. In 1980 his report to the Club of Rome, Road Maps to the Future, came out; it is about how to make societies more effective.
From 1989 he worked closely with Ukraine’s scientific and state institutions. In 1991–1998 he chaired the Consultative Advisory Council to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (the parliament), was co-chair of the International Renaissance Foundation, and co-founded the International Management Institute in Kyiv. From 1990 he was a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and from 2003 an honorary consul of Ukraine in Switzerland. He died in Kyiv in 2016.
Why it matters today
Hawrylyshyn’s story shows how Ukrainians of the diaspora can help their country: he passed on the knowledge he had gained at the world’s management schools to a young independent state.
