Our Team

EMIB is a student-led initiative based at UC Berkeley. Membership is primarily drawn from Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students, though we occasionally admit students from other universities across the Bay Area.

Late industrialization allows economies to adopt mature technologies developed elsewhere, reducing the need to reproduce the full sequence of earlier industrialization.

We use “emerging markets” to describe economies where catch-up depends on converting imported technology into domestic productive capability.

We host a monthly speaker series with economists and senior leaders across government and industry, and produce research briefs on industrial upgrading in emerging markets.

Kei Hayashi is a student at the University of California, Berkeley, concentrating in Mathematics, and the founder of LocalHost HQ, a media lab based in Tokyo and Bangalore. He has spoken on youth digital policy at various UN and government summits, most recently at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum in Geneva, co-hosted by the Swiss Confederation and the ITU. His company was also invited by the Government of India and NVDIA to jointly host an official film festival at India’s first international AI summit.

Piyush Acharya is a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology (M.E.T.) program, and a Young Trade Leader at the World Trade Organization. He is interested in how AI is reshaping global trade, particularly cross-border data flows and digital privacy. Selected as one of seven Young Trade Leaders worldwide, he works with the WTO Secretariat and has spoken at the WTO Public Forum in Geneva. He also chaired Rep. Adam Smith’s Youth Advisory Council, where he authored legislative memos that contributed to three bill cosponsorships in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Elimbek Kalilov is a student at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Physics and Economics, and the former host of MarcoPolo, one of the largest startup podcasts focused on the Asia-Pacific. He is passionate about new pathways of industrialization for Central Asian economies and the role of growth equity in accelerating them. He has produced work on technology and economic development at The Classical Society, and previously worked on cross-border investment and talent initiatives with the Seoul Metropolitan Government.