Foreign Affairs and the Economic Studies Program have inaugurated an annual series of conferences on international economic trends. The conferences focus on those critical developments on the horizon that will be affecting the global economy in the mid- to long term, with special emphasis on what will be occurring at the intersection of markets and public policy. The conferences have a comparative focus, dealing with each topic in the context of the different countries and regions of the world. The inaugural conference addressed a topic viewed as perhaps the world's single most important--and intractable--economic challenge: the impact on the global economy of the aging of the world's population, and, specifically, the effect on worldwide economic growth and international capital flows of the explosion of public pension systems as we currently know them. The conference attracted a first-rate group of domestic and international speakers from both the private and public sect! or, amongst whom Laura Tyson, then Chair of the National Economic Council, Martin Feldstein, President of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Robert Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Norbert Walter, Chief Economist at Deutsche Bank, and Lawrence Summers, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.