Stephan Barisitz is Senior Economist in the Foreign Research Division of the Austrian Central Bank. He joined the bank in Dec 1998 and focuses on country- research and monitoring of Russia, Ukraine, CIS, South Eastern Europe, as well as on banking and financial sector analysis. In 2008, Stephan passed his habilitation exam in economic history at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). His habilitation thesis deals with banking transformation in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union since the 1980s. From 2009 to 2013 he was lecturer at the Institute for Economic and Social History and has been carrying out research on the economic history of Central Asia and the Silk Road. Before coming back to Vienna in 1998, Stephan worked for three years as an economist at the OECD in Paris, where, together with a colleague, has was in charge of the Russia-CIS-Bulgaria Desk of the OECD Economics Department. Before that he was from 1992 to 1995 with the AustrianInstitute for East and South-East European Studies (OSI), Vienna, responsible for economic research and editing of Institute publications. Stephan started out his career as an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) in 1986. Stephan had studied economics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and, after a research stay at Carleton University, Ottawa, passed his doctorate the same year.