Léa Hakim is the Senior Country Economist for Armenia at the World Bank. She oversees multi-sectoral policy-based lending operations targeting reforms and leads analytical work on macroeconomic, fiscal and development issues, working closely with sectoral colleagues to drive impactful change. She has 20 years of experience at the national and international levels covering macroeconomic monitoring and policy-advisory, debt management reform, capital market issuance (> US$21 billion) and climate change finance.
Previously, Ms. Hakim was Senior Economist in the World Bank's Global Macro and Debt Analytics team and Program Manager of the Debt Management Facility, where she established the third and scaled-up phase of this multi-donor trust fund that provides advisory, training and peer-to-peer learning on debt management, debt transparency and related issues to 86 developing countries.
Before her tenure at the World Bank, which began in 2014 as the Country Economist for Jordan, Ms. Hakim served as the Senior Economic Officer at the Lebanese Ministry of Finance. There, she provided economic and fiscal policy advice to Ministers of Finance (2007-2014) and led technical assistance and capacity-building initiatives under a UNDP project. During this time she also led Eurobond issuances for Lebanon and worked on debt management reforms while serving as instructor at the American University of Beirut’s Economics Department.
Ms. Hakim holds an M.A. in International and Development Economics from Yale University, where she was a Fulbright scholar, and a high distinction B.A. in Economics from the American University of Beirut. She is passionate about public policy, sustainable development and the performing arts.