Ivan Miklos

Ivan Miklos is a former deputy prime minister and minister of finance of the Slovak Republic (2002-2006, 2010-2012), deputy prime minister for economy (1998-2002), and minister of privatization (1991-1992).

He co-founded and led the economic think tank MESA10 (1992-1998). Between 2006-2010 and 2012-2016, he was a member of the Slovak parliament. In 2014, he was reappointed as the president of MESA10 and became a member of the International Advisory Board of the National Reform Council of Ukraine and the platform VoxUkraine.

From 2015 to 2016, he served as a chief advisor to Ukraine’s minister of finance and as an advisor to Ukraine’s minister of economic development and trade. From April 2016 until August 2019, he served as a chief economic advisor to the prime minister of Ukraine. After the change of the government, from November 2019 until March 2020, he was an economic advisor to the prime minister of Ukraine.

From 2016 to 2020 he chaired the Strategic Advisory Group for Support of Ukrainian Reforms (SAGSUR).

He is also co-founder of the Ukrainian economic think tank the Centre for Economic Strategy. Since August 2021, he has been a member of the Strategic Council for the Implementation of the Slovak Recovery and Resilience Plan led by the prime minister. In November 2021, he became an advisor to the prime minister of Moldova.

Mr. Miklos was one of the leading figures of economic transformation in the Slovak Republic. He significantly contributed to the entry of the Slovak Republic into the OECD and instigated an extensive and effective tax reform. He led the government agenda on economic restructuring and fiscal consolidation. The second Dzurinda government (2002-2006) gained a very reformist reputation thanks to severe austerity measures and a comprehensive program of structural reforms (tax, social sector, pension, healthcare, public finance, labor market) backed by Mr. Miklos. Thanks to these reforms, Slovakia was able to join the eurozone in 2009. In 2004, he was awarded “Best Minister of Finance of the Year” by Euromoney, and “Top Business Reformer” in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report.

Mr. Miklos is the author of “Book of Reforms” (2005), “Rewriting the Rule” (2001) and dozens of studies and articles in the expert and popular press. He is also the author of the chapter about Slovak reforms in the book “The Great Rebirth: Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism” (2014). Under his leadership, in 2019 SAGSUR published a book about the Ukrainian reform process entitled “Reforms in Ukraine after Revolution of Dignity: What was done, why not more and what to do next” (2019), to which he contributed the chapter “Political Economy of Reforms: Political system, governance and corruption.”