World Bank Enterprise Surveys Symposium: Global Business Environment and Firm Productivity

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.

Prior to joining the IFC, Mr. Diop served as the World Bank's Vice President for Infrastructure from 2018 to 2021, where he led the Bank's global efforts to build sustainable infrastructure in developing and emerging economies. Before that, he served for six years as the World Bank's Vice President for Africa.

Mr. Diop's career spans both the public and private sectors. He started his career in the banking industry before joining the IMF and later the World Bank. He also served as Minister of Economy and Finance of Senegal.

Makhtar Diop has been named one of the 100 most influential Africans in the world. In 2015, he received the prestigious Regents' Lectureship Award from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Diop holds degrees in economics from the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham in England.

Roberta Gatti oversees analytical work to support the World Bank’s operations and economic surveillance in countries in the Middle East and North Africa region of the World Bank. In her previous capacity of Chief Economist for the Human Development practice group, she co-led the conceptualization and release of the World Bank Human Capital Index and oversaw the Service Delivery Indicators data initiative. Roberta joined the World Bank in 1998 as a Young Professional in the Macro unit of the Development Research Group. She has since led analytical agendas on growth, firm productivity, gender, social inclusion and labor markets, including as the Global Lead for Labor policies. She has also managed teams and lending portfolios in both the MENA and the Europe and Central Asia regions.

Roberta’s research is published in top field journals such as the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and the Journal of Development Economics. Roberta is also the author of numerous flagship reports, including Jobs for Shared Prosperity: Time for Action in the Middle East and North Africa; Being Fair, Faring Better: Promoting Equality of Opportunity for Marginalized Roma; The Human Capital Project; and The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19.

Roberta holds a B.A. from Università Bocconi and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. She has taught at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities.

Jorge Rodríguez Meza has been the Manager of the Enterprise Analysis Unit at the World Bank since 2012. He has been with the Unit since 2005 when he joined the organization. Over these years, he has worked on projects measuring the business environment and its impact on development in all regions of the world. Most of this data collection work has translated into an extensive list of research published in journals, reports, and policy notes on issues as varied as access to finance, corruption, job creation, productivity, firm dynamics and experimental data collection.

Prior to joining the World Bank, and after completing his doctorate degree, Jorge worked for five years as a Senior Researcher of the Rural Finance Program of The Ohio State University. During his tenure he combined his experience on data collection with research on poverty measurement, microfinance, and financial access by marginal sectors of society.

Jorge holds a PhD and an MA in Economics from The Ohio State University and a Master of Science in Economics from Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London. His areas of expertise are applied research on financial and private sector development, industrial organization, data collection, and survey implementation.

Jan De Loecker is a highly distinguished economist specializing in development economics, industrial organization, and international economics, with a special focus on measuring, and identifying the drivers of firm performance. He is a Professor of Economics and Research Professor (BOF) at the KU Leuven, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, former Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is a Managing Editor at The Review of Economic Studies (a scientific journal). He was a full-time faculty at the Princeton University from 2008-2017 (tenured 2014-2017). He was a visiting faculty at Yale University and Stanford University.

Jan De Loecker has put forward empirical frameworks to estimate productivity, marginal costs and markups, using micro-level production data, which have been widely used to study the role of technology, market power, international competition, in shaping the performance of individual producers, and industries and economies at large. He has published extensively, with over 13,000 citations, including publications in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and various field journals. He has received many awards and grants, and has advised various corporations, institutions and international agencies on productivity and firm performance measurement, on the impact of trade/industrial policy on growth. His work has been referenced in major news outlets (link).

Diego Restuccia is a highly distinguished economist specializing in macroeconomics and productivity.  He is a Professor of Economics and a Canada Research Chair in Macroeconomics and Productivity at the University of Toronto. He was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2024. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge MA (USA) and a Research Associate at Theoretical Research in Development Economics (ThReD).

Diego Restuccia has written over 100 research papers with over 10,000 citations. His research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, development, and labor economics, and focuses on understanding the great disparities in income across countries. His recent work examines the role of resource allocation of economic factors such as capital and labor across firms or sectors in accounting for macroeconomic outcomes. His work has appeared in leading economic journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, and the Review of Economic Studies. Diego Restuccia has received many awards and grants, including the Bank of Canada Fellowship Award (received twice).

Susan M. Lund is IFC’s Vice President for Economics and Private Sector Development. She leads a global team that provides economic and analytical support to IFC investments and private capital mobilization. Specific responsibilities of her vice presidency include assessing the development impact of IFC investments, conducting economic research on issues related to private sector development, deploying blended concessional finance to de-risk private sector investments, and leading IFC efforts to build strategic relationships with public and private sector entities, including governments, international organizations, civil society, foundations, and other key development partners.

Prior to joining IFC, Ms. Lund was a partner at McKinsey & Company and leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. In that role, she served as an active research economist and an advisor to companies and policymakers around the world. Her published research has focused on the evolution of global value chains and trade, technology and its impact on the future of work, and global financial market development.

Norman Loayza is Director of the Global Indicators Group at the World Bank. He currently supervises the flagship data and reports, Women, Business and the Law, Enterprise Surveys, Global and Subnational Business Ready, the successor to the discontinued Doing Business. 

Previously, he was a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group and managed the Asia hub of the Research Group, based in Malaysia. He was director of the World Development Report 2014, Risk and Opportunity: Managing Risk for Development. His research has dealt with various areas of economic and social development, including macroeconomic management, economic growth, microeconomic flexibility, private and public saving, financial depth and stability, natural disasters, and crime and violence. His advisory experience at the World Bank has also ranged across different topics in various regions and countries.

On external service from the World Bank, he was a Senior Economist at the Central Bank of Chile (1999-2000), where he advised on financial and monetary policy.

Norman has edited 10 books and published dozens of papers in professional journals and edited volumes. A Peruvian national, he holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University (1994).