Full Biography
Jim Kolbe is Senior Advisor at the consulting firm of McLarty Associates. He currently serves as a Senior Transatlantic Fellow for the German Marshall Fund. He advises on trade matters as well as issues of effectiveness of US assistance to foreign countries, on US-EU relationships, and on migration and its relationship to development. He is co-chair of the Transatlantic Taskforce on Development with Gunilla Carlsson, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation. He also serves as an adjunct Professor in the College of Business at the University of Arizona, and serves on a part time basis as strategic consultant with McLarty Associates.
For 22 years, Jim Kolbe served in the United States House of Representatives, elected for eleven consecutive terms, from 1985 to 2007. He represented the Eighth (previously designated the Fifth) congressional district, comprising the southeastern part of Arizona with Tucson as the main population area. While in Congress, Jim served for 20 years on the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives, responsible for deciding the allocation of the budget and the terms for spending appropriated funds. He was chairman of the Treasury, Post Office and Related Agencies subcommittee for four years, and for the last six years in Congress, he chaired the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Agencies subcommittee.
He has received numerous awards and tributes, but notable among them is the George Marshall Award for Distinguished Service from the United States Agency for International Development and the Order of the Aztec from the President of Mexico. Kolbe graduated from Northwestern University with a BA degree in Political Science and then from Stanford University with an MBA and a concentration in economics.