His father was the U.S. consul stationed there in the mid 1960s. He was seven when they arrived and remembers living on Prospect Avenue and attending Sacred Heart Elementary Catholic School. His father’s many diplomatic posts helped lead the Dublin, Ireland-born, U.S. citizen to the top legal job at the world’s largest financial rescue organization.

“My father was in the foreign service, so that gave me an interest in international affairs. When I graduated from law school, I moved to New York for a year and a half before I went to Tokyo."

In the late 1980s, Japan and much of Asia was in a boom. Hagan found himself working for a law firm where he was in the rather ironic position of advising Japanese companies on aquiring American ones. He returned to Southeast Asia in the 1990s under dramatically different circumstances as the bust lead him to work in Korea and Indonesia.

He recalls a valuable lesson from that time and one that no doubt guides much of his work with the IMF today — a country’s laws are only as strong as the institutions that enforce them. “I remember doing work in Indonesia during the Asian crisis and they had a bankruptcy law that was derived from the Dutch bankruptcy law having been a Dutch colony. While, however, the Netherlands had a very good bankruptcy system, I think it is fair to say at that time the bankruptcy system in Indonesia was almost non-existent and the problem was not the design of the law but the implementation.

“That is why we are always concerned about making decisions on designs of law in the context of a crisis.”

The equation is a simple one, laws can be written very easily, but a decree is nothing without enforcement. If the systems are not in place, the people are not trained to work with the laws, then the decrees cannot be carried out.

“The implementation is critical . . . changes to the law can be effected relatively quickly, but enhancing the institutional capacity of a country takes much longer,” Hagan says.

The IMF works with its sister organization the World Bank. Hagan points out, the bank is a development institution that helps educate and train the people of a country creating institutional capacity.

There are 185 member countries in the IMF and the fund has three main functions. The first is proactive: monitoring economic and financial trends and developments, and giving advice. It provides funding to countries with balance-of-payment difficulties, and gives countries technical assistance and training. The overall goal is to strengthen each country’s financial system. Recently, a fourth counter-terrorism function has been added. The IMF looks into the financial systems of its member countries to help create systems that are safe from money laundering.