Enabling the Private Sector ─ World Bank Conference on Public Institutions for Development

Aart Kraay is the Chief Economist of the Prosperity VPU at the World Bank. His research focuses on macroeconomics in developing countries, international capital movements, growth, poverty, inequality, institutions, governance, and applied econometrics. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and has had editorial roles in prominent publications including the World Bank Economic Review, the World Bank Research Observer, and the Journal of Development Economics. With a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto, he has also held visiting positions at the IMF and MIT's Sloan School of Management and taught at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Arturo Herrera is Global Director for Institutions in the Prosperity vertical, World Bank Group, Governance. Mr. Herrera is a Mexican National, has extensive experience in governance, as a practitioner and from the development and academic perspectives. He joined the World Bank in 2010 as Senior Public Sector Management Specialist in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. He held various positions in the Bank including as Sector Manager in LAC, Practice Manager in Governance Global Practice for the LAC and East Asia and the Pacific regions in the Global Unit before leaving the World Bank Group in 2018.

Between 2018 and 2021 he has held leadership positions in the Government of Mexico as Co-Head of the Finance Team in Presidential Transition Team, Deputy Finance Minister and, most recently, as Minister of Finance and Public Credit. He was also the Chairman of Mexico’s Exchange Commission and Member of the Board of the Central Bank. As Global Director for Institutions, country-level governance, especially in fragile, conflict and violent settings; maximizing the effectiveness of operational support for public financial management and public procurement; fostering excellence in the Bank's Prosperity vertical work on public sector administration and operational support for legal and judicial reforms. Mr. Herrera has also taught Monetary and Banking and Macro and Microeconomics at both El Colegio de Mexico and New York University where he completed his doctoral studies in Economics.

Bence Toth is a PhD candidate at University College London and a senior researcher at the Government Transparency Institute. His work explores the interaction between informal practices and formal rules in public procurement markets, focusing on how favoritism, corruption, and collusion shape tendering outcomes. In addition to his academic work, he actively contributes to the creation and publication of standardized public procurement datasets, which are essential for understanding who gets what and how.

Bob Rijkers is a Senior Economist in the Trade and International Integration Unit of the Development Research Group (DECTI), professor of Political Economy at Utrecht University and co-editor of the World Bank Economic Review. His research interests include state capture, corruption, and the distributional impacts of trade. His research has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of Development Economics. He holds a BA in Science and Social Sciences from University College Utrecht, Utrecht University and an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Devis Decet is a PhD student in economics at Northwestern University. He works on development, public, and environmental economics.

Dimas Mateus Fazio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School. He completed his Ph.D. in Finance at London Business School in 2020, following earlier degrees from the University of São Paulo (M.Sc. in Economics, 2014) and the University of Brasília (B.A. in Economics, 2012). His research examines how financial and institutional factors shape economic efficiency and resource allocation. His work spans several interconnected areas including banking stability, labor markets, housing finance, and public sector efficiency. His research has been published in leading journals including The Review of Financial Studies, and his current projects investigate how institutional quality affects market outcomes through courts, housing collateral reforms, and government procurement systems

Edwin Muhumuza is the Head of Africa at the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP), where he leads the portfolio to open up and transform public procurement across the African continent. Edwin works with frontline government teams in several African countries to redesign government processes and systems through open data, better civic and business engagement, monitoring and research. Through engagements with senior decision makers at country, regional and global levels, he advocates for changes in how procurement and procurement systems serve African governments and their citizens, turning procurement from a compliance driven, complex, paper-based process into an open, results-driven digital service that delivers value for money, as well as value for many. Before joining OCP, Edwin worked at the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority (PPDA), the public procurement regulator in Uganda where he rose through the ranks to the position Director Corporate Affairs. He was responsible for strategy, research, performance monitoring and was at the forefront of some key reform initiatives such as e-procurement, open contracting and promotion of partnerships with non-state actors in contract monitoring.

Elena Stella is a PhD student at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. She works at the intersection between corporate finance and political economy.

Eric Hsu is a development economist with interests in energy and environment. His work focuses on firm and household barriers to adopting technologies in low-income settings. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer with Y-RISE at the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Francesca Recanatini is a Lead Economist at the World Bank and has worked on institution building and corruption for more than two decades. Throughout her career, she has focused on integrating issues of governance and corruption in development policies using data and stakeholder participation. She joined the World Bank in 1998 and has worked in several countries in Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to support the design and implementation of governance reforms through in-depth data collection, coalition building and multisector engagement. Currently she works on public sector reforms and multistakeholder anticorruption initiatives in Latin America, Middle East and Africa, with a particular focus on institutional factors that can contribute to country resilience and reduce instability and state capture.

She has published several papers on corruption, governance indicators and transition, co-authoring the Building for Peace in MENA Report (World Bank, 2020), contributing to the Report on Enhancing Government Effectiveness and Transparency (World Bank, 2020); to the Oxford Handbook on Quality of Government (Marcia Grimes and Bo Rothstein, eds. 2020), Anticorruption Policy: Can International Actors Play a Role? (Susan Rose-Ackerman and Paul Carrington, eds. 2013); to the Global Handbook on Research and Practice in Corruption (Adam Graycar, editor, 2012); and to the International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption (Susan Rose-Akerman and Tina Soreide, eds. 2011). She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland at College Park.

Franziska Ohnsorge is the World Bank Chief Economist for South Asia. In this role, she is responsible for leading the research program on key economic issues in South Asia to inform the policy debate and World Bank lending. Before starting this position, she was the Manager at the Development Economics Vice Presidency where she spearheaded the flagship Global Economic Prospects report. Prior to joining the World Bank, Franziska Ohnsorge worked in the Office of the Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and at the International Monetary Fund. Her research has been featured in peer-reviewed journals as well as policy publications and has covered a wide range of topics in international macroeconomics and finance, including debt and financial crises, 3 inflation and monetary policy, as well as growth and informal labor markets. Her work has been widely cited, including in the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

Guo Xu is an Associate Professor in Business and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He is a research associate at the NBER and an Affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). He also serves as Co-Editor at the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization and as Associate Editor at the Journal of Political Economy and Econometrica. His research focuses on the link between state capacity, bureaucracy and economic performance.

Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, Gill served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he helped shape the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program.

Gill led the World Bank’s influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His work includes introducing the concept of the “middle-income trap” to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. He has published extensively on key policy issues facing developing countries—among other things, sovereign debt vulnerabilities, green growth and natural-resource wealth, labor markets, and poverty and inequality. Gill has also taught at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Juan Felipe Riaño is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Georgetown University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Political Economy, Development Economics, and Economic History. He is particularly focused on understanding the determinants of state capacity in developing countries, the long-term effects of conflict and historical institutions on economic development, and the organizational economics of public sector institutions. Before joining Georgetown in 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford (2022–2023). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of British Columbia (2022) and MA, BA, and B.Sc. degrees in Economics and Industrial Engineering from Universidad de los Andes.

Julieta Peveri is an Assistant Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Research Fellow at the Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne (CES). Prior to joining Paris 1, she was a post-doctoral scholar at ENS de Lyon (2022–2023) and completed her PhD at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics in June 2022. She was also a visiting scholar at Bocconi University (2021) and at Paris School of Economics (2023). Her research focuses on political economy and development economics, with a particular emphasis on political selection, corruption, clientelism, and quality of governance.

Justice Tei Mensah is a Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region at the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was an Economist at the International Finance Corporation (IFC). His research, policy, and operational work cover a range of policy-relevant questions related to Digitization, Firms, and Infrastructure. He leads the World Bank’s Think Africa Partnership (TAP) multi-donor trust fund. TAP is the Africa Regions’ flagship trust fund focused on supporting economic transformation and growth in the region through uptake of policyrelevant knowledge and data.

He also manages the World Bank’s Chief Economist of Government (CEoG) network— a peer network of chief economic advisors to heads of states and prime ministers in over 40 African countries. Justice holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, an MPhil in Economics from the University of Ghana, and a BA in Economics from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.

Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor’s professor of economics at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). His research spans public finance and development economics with a focus on improving education, health, welfare, and public service delivery; and has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, and Econometrica. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), and several leading global research organizations.

His recent book, “Accelerating India’s Development” (2024) systematically analyses India’s governance challenges, especially in delivering essential public services, and highlights how these are limiting India’s development. Drawing on a wealth of research and practical insights, it provides actionable, evidence-based strategies, emphasizing statelevel reforms as critical for India’s advancement. Written to be widely accessible, the book aims to bridge the gap between scholarly research, public understanding, and actionable governance. It’s ideas and themes are also relevant globally. Prof. Muralidharan has also actively engaged in policy advising and capacity building in India, and in public communication of research insights through several op-eds and podcasts. He is also the co-founder and scientific director of the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS), a non-profit organization that works with multiple state governments across India to improve state capacity, governance, and service delivery. Born and raised in India, he holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard, an MPhil from Cambridge (UK), and a PhD in economics from Harvard. 

Lixin Colin Xu is a Professor of Economics at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB). Before joining CKGSB, he was a lead economist of the Research Group of the World Bank. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. and B.A. from Peking University. Dr. Xu has done extensive research on China’s transition, the role of the business environment in firm performance, and how history shapes current economic performance.

He has published more than 60 articles in academic journals including American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Those papers are cited more than 14,000 times in Google. His research has been featured in The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Strait Times, Sina Finance and Economics, and Barrons.

Luis Felipe López-Calva is the Global Director for Poverty and Equity at the World Bank. He has over 25 years of professional experience working with international institutions and advising national governments. Prior to rejoining the World Bank in 2022, he served as UN Assistant Secretary General and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Nations Development Program. Previously at the World Bank, López-Calva led research, financing, and policy engagement on poverty and inequality issues across multiple regions, and has served the CoDirector for the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law.

López-Calva has also held various positions in academia including as a visiting scholar/professor at Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California-San Diego and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER). His research interests focus on labor markets, poverty and inequality, institutions, and the microeconomics of development. He holds a master’s degree in economics from Boston University, as well as a master’s and a PhD in Economics from Cornell University.

Manuel García-Santana is a Senior Economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth Unit of the Development Research Group. His research focuses on the macroeconomic aspects of development and trade. Before joining the World Bank, Manuel was an Associate Professor at Pompeu Fabra University and a Kenen Fellow at Princeton University, International Economics Section. 

Manuel Ramos-Maqueda is a Governance Specialist at the World Bank's Institutions Global Department. He has ample experience in utilizing data science and technology to enhance the accessibility, effectiveness, and accountability of public institutions. Manuel focuses on governance, justice, and the rule of law, leading innovative projects across Latin America, East Africa, and Europe. His collaborative work with government partners involves the strategic use of data, technology, and artificial intelligence to improve justice systems and evaluate their impacts on development outcomes. Prior to joining the World Bank, Manuel worked with the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Manuel holds a double degree in Law 5 and Economics from Carlos III University of Madrid, an M.A. in International Policy from Stanford University, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford.

Michael Best is an associate professor of economics at Columbia University. His research focuses on improving government effectiveness in low- and middle-income countries, particularly by improving tax compliance and bureaucratic performance. His research has been published in leading journals in economics including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy. He has developed research-policy partnerships with governments in Pakistan, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, and Mexico. Prior to joining Columbia, Michael was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Michael holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics and an M.Phil from the University of Oxford. 

Nicola Mastrorocco is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna. His research interests center around political economy and applied economics. Before joining Bologna, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Trinity College Dublin. His current research agenda focuses on the organisational economics of the state, the economics of media and the economics of crime and corruption.

Paolo Mauro is Director of the Economic and Market Research Department at the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Prior to joining IFC, he worked at the International Monetary Fund for almost thirty years, most recently as Deputy Director, Fiscal Affairs Department. In 2014-16 he was Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, on topics including corruption, sovereign bond spreads, and growth-indexed bonds. He has coauthored three books: World on the Move: Consumption Patterns in a More Equal Global Economy; Emerging Markets and Financial Globalization: Sovereign Bond Spreads in 1870–1913 and Today; and Chipping Away at Public Debt. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from the University of Oxford.

Pierre Bachas is an Economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth Team in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. His research focuses on public finance. His work uses mainly administrative data, in collaboration with tax administrations, to evaluate the design of taxes and transfers and their impact on equity and efficiency. He also studies international taxation and how digital technology is changing public finance and accelerating financial inclusion. He holds a Bachelor and master's in economics from the LSE, and a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley. He previously was an Assistant Professor of Economics at ESSEC Business School in Paris.

Qianmiao (Michelle) Chen is a research economist in the Development Impact Evaluation Department (DIME) at the World Bank. She earned her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024. Her research focuses on exploring the intricate relationship between policies and their impacts on firms and the broader economy. In particular, she is interested in public procurement policies in developing countries.

Rebecca Perlman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary field of research is international political economy, with a focus on regulatory politics, the governance of multinational firms, and the politics of climate change. Her book, Regulating Risk: How Private Information Shapes Global Safety Standards, was published with Cambridge University Press. It explores how producers leverage private information in order to win regulatory barriers to competition and trade at the domestic and international levels of governance. Professor Perlman has also published work in the American Journal of Political Science, Science Advances, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Legal Analysis. 

Rema Hanna is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies and Chair of the International Development Area at the Harvard Kennedy School. She serves as the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL South-East Asia in Indonesia and the co-Scientific Director of the Social Protection Initiative, a joint initiative of J-PAL and CID in Morocco. Her research revolves around improving the provision of public services in developing and emerging nations, particularly for the very poor and her work has been published in leading economics journals. In addition, Professor Hanna is a Research Associate with NBER and a BREAD affiliate. She is currently on the editorial board at the American Economic Review and previously was on the board of Review of Economics and Statistics and VoxDev and served as a co-Editor at the Journal of Human Resources. She holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ricardo Dahis is an assistant professor (senior lecturer) at the Department of Economics at Monash University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Politics, Environment, and Development Economics. It has been published in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Public Economics. He co-founded Data Basis (Base dos Dados), a nonprofit start-up with the mission to make access to high-quality data universal in Brazil and internationally. They build tools such as a search engine and a public datalake to facilitate data work for academics, journalists, policy makers, companies, and developers.

Rita Ramalho is a Lead Economist in the Public Institutions Data and Analytics Unit of the Governance Global Practice at the World Bank. The Public Institutions Unit focuses on data on government and governance patterns in developing countries to serve a wide range of users and supports a repository of key global, regional, and country analytical studies. Previously she was a Lead Economist in the World Bank Chief Economist's Office where she researched the links between sovereign debt and private sector development, in particular the importance of domestic arrears for firms. She was part of the 2022 World Development Report team on Finance for Equitable Recovery. Previously she led the Global Indicators Group which housed data products such as Enterprise Surveys, Women Business and the Law, Enabling the Business of Agriculture, as well as other indicator projects. Prior to that she was the program manager of different units in that department including Enterprise Surveys and Women, Business and the Law.

Rita Ramalho holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the impact of regulation on economic variables such as growth, where she found that better business regulations can lead to more growth, the impact of regulations on female labor force participation, tax policy and entrepreneurship, labor regulations, and the size of the informal sector. She speaks Portuguese and is conversant in Spanish.

Romain Ferrali is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics. His research lies at the intersection of economics and political science, focusing on the political economy of development with a geographic emphasis on Sub-Saharan and North Africa. He combines theoretical and empirical approaches, with a strong interest in network analysis, to study development failures—instances where solutions intended to foster progress instead hinder it—by examining their political and organizational determinants.

Ferrali’s work is organized around two main research programs. The first explores corruption, particularly in organizations, analyzing how unethical behavior diffuses within social networks and organizational structures. The second examines the role of new information technologies in development, especially in autocratic regimes, investigating the conditions under which these technologies either promote or hinder development. His work has been published in leading journals across disciplines, including American Journal of Political Science, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and Science Advances.

Sean Ennis is Director of the Centre for Competition Policy and Professor of Competition Policy at the Norwich Business School of the University of East Anglia (UEA). He specializes in industrial organization, regulatory governance, contracting and innovation. He previously worked as an economist at the OECD, the European Commission, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. In addition to authoring more than 30 research papers, reports and book chapters, he has presented his views to the G20, the OECD, the United Nations, the European and UK Parliaments, regulators, and companies. He earned a PhD from UC Berkeley and BA Hons from King’s College, Cambridge.

Shantayanan Devarajan is Professor of the Practice of International Development at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Prior to Georgetown, he spent 28 years at the World Bank, where he was the Senior Director for Development Economics, the Chief Economist of the South Asia, Africa, and Middle East and North Africa regions and of the Human Development Network, and Research Manager for Public Economics. Before joining the World Bank, he was on the faculty of Harvard Kennedy School. Born in Sri Lanka, Shanta received his A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Siphosethu Tetani is a competition and regulatory economist from South Africa. She is currently a senior economist at the Competition Commission of South Africa, where she has gained experience leading complex enforcement and merger cases in various sectors, including transport and logistics, food and digital markets. She has more than 8 years of professional experience working on public policy and regulation, with particular interest on competition and 7 international trade economics. She holds a master’s degree in economics from the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. She is a published author in local and international journals. In April 2024, she was presented with an award for the best academic paper in the Concurrences Global Antitrust Writing Awards in the Digital Category for her research article titled "An analysis of competition dynamics in South African digital markets for travel and tourism".

Susanna Berkouwer is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Their research spans environmental economics and development economics, with projects studying energy efficiency adoption, carbon offsets, electricity grids, and air pollution from energy usage. They are an Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. Susanna holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MA from Yale University and teaches microeconomics in the Wharton MBA program. 

Thelma Elizabeth Ohene-Larbi is a knowledgeable tax professional with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), serving in the Domestic Tax Revenue Division (DTRD). With over five years of experience in taxation and financial management at GRA, she is committed to promoting compliance and supporting national economic growth through effective tax administration and education. Thelma holds an MCom in Taxation from Pentecost University, an MSc in Industrial Finance and Investment from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and a BSc in Finance and Entrepreneurship Development from Garden City University.

She is also a student at the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICA) Ghana, pursuing her professional certification. Her expertise includes tax auditing, liabilities assessment, and tax education among taxpayers. Before joining the GRA, she served as a Senior Finance Officer at Ghana Dock Labour-Takoradi, where she developed strong skills in financial management and internal controls. Thelma is an active member of the Rotary Club, where she contributes to community development, fundraising, and people management initiatives. She has also participated in the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, further broadening her professional insights. Her commitment to advancing and implementing tax administration and fiscal policies reflects a seamless blend of professionalism and a relentless pursuit of excellence.

Thiago Scot is an Economist at the Development Impact (DIME) department at the World Bank. His research is focused on public finances in low- and middle-income countries and has been published in journals such as the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Thiago holds a PhD from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.