Kodzovi Senu Abalo

Dr. Kodzovi Senu Abalo is a Senior Economist in the Economic Policy Global Department of the World Bank and has served as the Senior Country Economist for Burundi since 2024. His work focuses on supporting governments, including in fragile and climate-exposed contexts, with macro-fiscal reform design and implementation to advance growth, debt sustainability, and poverty reduction. Since joining the World Bank in 2020, he has played a leading role in strengthening macroeconomic modeling, public finance management, and climate-informed economic planning across several regions.

With over a decade of experience at the intersection of macroeconomics, development, and climate policy, Dr. Abalo combines applied research with operational leadership. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, he pioneered the Economic Policy Department’s adoption of high-frequency mobility data to nowcast the impacts of the crisis on the real sector, an innovation that has since become widely institutionalized. He has also been a core contributor to the World Bank’s efforts to expand its macro-fiscal modeling framework (MFMod) to incorporate the economic impacts of climate change and climate adaptation policies. His work has supported climate-informed macroeconomic modeling across more than a dozen countries and has included collaborations with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to quantify biophysical climate damages.

Operationally, Dr. Abalo has co-led several development policy financing operations totaling nearly $1.5 billion and has overseen core diagnostics, including Public Finance Reviews, Country Economic Memorandums, Systematic Country Diagnostics, and Economic Updates. His policy reform engagement spans growth policies, domestic revenue mobilization, debt transparency and contingent liability management, wage bill management, public spending efficiency, social protection systems and financing, and climate-related fiscal governance. He has also delivered extensive technical capacity-building for ministries of finance, debt management agencies, and other public institutions on fiscal risk assessment, debt management, macro-modeling, and climate finance.

Before joining the World Bank, Dr. Abalo held senior roles in Togo’s Ministry of Planning and Development and the Office of the Presidency, where he supported structural transformation efforts, including growth acceleration and poverty reduction strategies, as well as public-private investment in transport and logistics infrastructure. He also worked at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), supporting regional initiatives on civil registration, vital statistics, and statistical capacity development.

Dr. Abalo holds a PhD in Economics from Pennsylvania State University, with specializations in international trade, development economics, and industrial organization. He also holds a Master’s in Applied Statistics and a Master’s in Statistics and Applied Economics from ENSEA in Abidjan. His academic excellence has been recognized with awards including the 2011 Jan Tinbergen Prize from the International Statistical Institute (ISI). He has served as a Global Shaper of the World Economic Forum and currently sits on the Scientific Committee of UNECA’s Young African Economist Network.

A national of Togo, he is currently based in Bujumbura, Burundi.