Abhijit Banerjee Chhaunk on Food, Economics and Society

Mr. Herrera, 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 Micro Economics at both El Colegio de Mexico and New York University where he completed his doctoral studies in Economics.

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the Lab’s Directors. Banerjee is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He is a winner of the Infosys Prize a co-recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his groundbreaking work in development economics research. 

Banerjee is the author of a large number of articles and six books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, Good Economics for Hard Times, both co-authored with Esther Duflo, and Cooking to Save Your Life. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. Banerjee has served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a trustee of Save the Children USA, a trustee of the British Museum, and the Chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel and the Global Advisory Board for Covid-19 Response of the government of West Bengal.