Gladys Lopez-Acevedo

Gladys Lopez Acevedo is a Lead Economist and Global Lead for World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice. Her professional career spans work in five World Bank regions, including as acting South Asia Chief Economist, and she has held high-level government positions in Mexico and in academia. Currently in the Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA), Gladys has been leading Bank analytical and operational work on distributional effects of COVID, conflict, informality, trade, digital/markets, fiscal incidence, green growth, labor markets, social protection, data/statistical capacity, poverty/equity, and gender. Having co-led Systematic Country Diagnostics (SCDs) for Afghanistan and Tunisia, she is now working on the SCD effort for Lebanon. As co-lead for the Global Program on the Distributional Impacts of Trade Program (DIOT), Gladys has substantially increased the work program. Previously, she served as Lead Economist in the World Bank Office of the Chief Economist, South Asian Region; Senior Economist in the Poverty Anchor, working with countries in the Africa and East Asia region; Senior Economist in the Latin America region; and Senior Country Economist based in Mexico. She holds Research Fellowships at a number of research organizations, including the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA), the Mexican National Research System (SNI), the Economic Research Forum, Duke University’s Global Value Chain Institute, and the 3ie Impact Evaluation Initiative. Before joining the World Bank, she held high-level positions in Mexico’s Ministry of Finance and in the Ministry of and taught as a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). Gladys has written extensively on economics in peer-reviewed journals. She holds a B.A in Economics from ITAM and a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Virginia.