About

Martin Ravallion, a native of Australia, is the Acting Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, a position he has held since June 2012. Before that he was Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank—the Bank’s research department.

Ravallion has held various positions in the Bank since he joined as an economist in 1988 and he has worked across multiple sectors and in all Bank regions.

Prior to joining the Bank, Martin was on the faculty of the Australian National University. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics (where he also taught economics), Oxford University, the Australian National University, Princeton University and the Paris School of Economics.

Ravallion’s main research interests over the last 25 years have concerned poverty and policies for fighting it. He is well-known for his work on measuring global poverty and for his work linking economic policies to the welfare of poor people, including the evaluation of anti-poverty programs.

He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on these topics, and he has written extensively on them, including four books and over 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes.

Ravallion serves on the editorial boards of 10 economics journals, is a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development and a Founding Council Member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality. In 2011 he received the John Kenneth Galbraith Award of America’s Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.