Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics 2025—Development in the Age of Populism

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, he 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. He 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. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Rachel Glennerster is the president of the Center for Global Development. Prior to joining CGD, she was at the University of Chicago. She has leveraged randomized trials to address critical issues spanning democracy, health, education, and women's empowerment and pioneered ways to shape markets to promote innovation to address global challenges including pandemics and climate change. She has also written on strategies to stimulate innovation, promoting more equitable access to vaccines, and the response to Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics. Dr. Glennerster previously served as Chief Economist at the Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for International Development in the UK. In 2021, Dr. Glennerster was appointed Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) for services in international development. She also currently serves as the Chair of Teaching at the Right Level Africa (TaRL Africa).

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Danny Quah is Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics and Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in income inequality, economic growth, and international economic relations. Dr. Quah’s work takes an economic approach to world order - focusing on global power shift and the rise of the east, and alternative models of global power relations. The economic approach emerges, in that Dr. Quah’s work studies the supply and demand of world order: What international system do the world’s superpowers wish to provide; what world order does the global community need? Dr. Quah’s work on income inequality sets the challenge against a broader background of social mobility and cohesion, and in so doing suggests a single narrative on the challenge of income inequality is unlikely to be correct or helpful.

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Justin Sandefur is the Lead for Economic Growth in LMICs Program, Open Philanthropy. Before joining Open Philanthropy, Mr. Sandefur was with the Center for Global Development (CGD) for over 15 years. In addition to his work as a Senior Fellow, Mr. Sandefur served as Research Manager and Director of CGD’s education program. His own research focused on the economics of education and health. Prior to joining CGD, Mr. Sandefur was a Resident Adviser to the Tanzanian government and a Research Officer at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies. He also taught as a Visiting Professor at Peking University’s National School of Development and Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and served as a consultant for the World Bank and various United Nations agencies.

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Masood Ahmed is the president emeritus of the Center for Global Development. He joined the Center in January 2017, capping a 35-year career driving economic development policy initiatives relating to debt, aid effectiveness, trade, and global economic prospects at major international institutions including the IMF, World Bank, and DFID. Ahmed joined CGD from the IMF, where he served for eight years as director, Middle East and Central Asia Department, earning praise from Managing Director Christine Lagarde as a “visionary leader.” In that role, he oversaw the Fund's operations in 32 countries, and managed relationships with key national and regional policy makers and stakeholders. In previous years, he also served as the IMF's director of External Relations, and deputy director of the Policy Development and Review Department.

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Selina Ho is Associate Professor in International Affairs and Vice-Dean (Research and Development), Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She researches how China wields power and influence via infrastructure and water disputes in Southeast Asia and South Asia. She is the author of Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-author of Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations (2020). She has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, commentaries, and op-eds. She is a Council Member of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. 

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Danny Quah is Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics and Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in income inequality, economic growth, and international economic relations. Dr. Quah’s work takes an economic approach to world order - focusing on global power shift and the rise of the east, and alternative models of global power relations. The economic approach emerges, in that Dr. Quah’s work studies the supply and demand of world order: What international system do the world’s superpowers wish to provide; what world order does the global community need? Dr. Quah’s work on income inequality sets the challenge against a broader background of social mobility and cohesion, and in so doing suggests a single narrative on the challenge of income inequality is unlikely to be correct or helpful.

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Xinquan Tu is Dean and Professor at the China Institute for WTO Studies, University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) where he has worked since 1996. His research and teaching focus on WTO, Chinese trade policy, US trade policy, China-US trade relations and government procurement. He has been Visiting Scholar at numerous institutions including Middlebury Institute for International Studies (2016), WTO Secretariat (2011), Indiana University (2011) and Johns Hopkins University (2006) and Visiting Fellow at German Institute for International and Security Affairs (2014) and Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (2009). He was Associate Professor (2008-2011) and Assistant Professor at UIBE (2003-2007) where he received his PhD in International Trade in 2004. He received his BA from Peking University in 1996.

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Matteo Bugamelli, an Italian national, is the Executive Director for Albania, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, San Marino, and Timor-Leste. He is currently the Dean of the World Bank Board of Executive Directors. He was the Chair of the Board’s Budget Committee from 2020 to 2022 and of the Board’s Audit Committee from 2022 to 2023. He also served on the Board’s Ethics Committee. Mr. Bugamelli comes from over 20 years of experience working with the Bank of Italy: immediately before joining the WBG Board, he was Director in the Research Department and Coordinator of the Regional Research Branches; and prior to that, he led the Economic Structure and Labor Market Division. Mr. Bugamelli has authored and co-authored several articles on International Trade, International Migration and Remittances, Firm Behavior.

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Daniel Björkegren is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). He works on digital transformation and applied machine learning, with a focus on developing economies. He works on methods to make algorithms more humane: robust, transparent, and better aligned with societal values. He is an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University, and a Bachelor degree in Physics from the University of Washington.

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Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. He studies the societal impact of digital technologies, especially AI. He led the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. His work was among the first to show how machine learning reflects cultural stereotypes, and his doctoral research showed the fundamental limits of de-identification. Mr. Narayanan is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), twice recipient of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award, and a three-time recipient of the Privacy Papers for Policy Makers Award.

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Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. She is the faculty director of the EMBA program. She has also been the Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program. Her research interests lie in how technology allows firms to use digital data and machine learning to improve performance, and in the challenges this poses for regulation. Ms. Tucker has particular expertise in online advertising, digital health, social media, and electronic privacy. Her research studies the interface between marketing, the economics of technology, and law. She is a cofounder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab which studies the applications of blockchain. She has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has testified to Congress regarding her work on digital privacy and algorithms, and presented her research to the OECD, World Bank, IMF, and the ECJ. 

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Han Sheng Chia is a Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD). His work focuses on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to development programs. He also works on improving the use of evidence in development policy and aid sector reform. He was previously a Senior Advisor in USAID’s Office of the Chief Economist, and helped shift the Agency’s spending to more cost-effective, evidence-based interventions. Prior to USAID, he was Vice President at GiveDirectly, where he led investments to achieve step function change in how the organization delivered cash transfers. Together with government partners and leading academics, he helped bring to market an AI driven approach to contactlessly identify, enroll, and deliver cash aid to hundreds and thousands of families in rural settings during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Gaurav Nayyar is Director of the World Development Report 2026 on Artificial Intelligence for Development and an Economic Adviser in the Development Economics Vice Presidency at the World Bank, which he joined as a Young Professional in 2013. Previously, he was an Economics Affairs Officer in the Economic Research Division of the World Trade Organization, where he co-led the World Trade Report 2013 on Factors Shaping the Future of World Trade. Mr. Nayyar's research interests lie primarily in the areas of economic growth, structural transformation, trade, technological change, industrialization, and firm productivity, and he has published in a variety of academic journals on these issues. His latest book is At Your Service? The Promise of Services-Led Development. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Dorothy Hodgkin Scholar. His other alma maters include the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Cambridge, and St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.

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Barbara Haya is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Environmental Public Policy (CEPP), at University of California-Berkeley, where she directs the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the outcomes and design of carbon trading and offsetting programs, and the limits to the effectiveness of carbon trading alone. The Project coordinates research and outreach to ensure its research results inform policy and program design. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, Bloomberg News, the Guardian, and MIT Technology Review. 

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Jan Steckel is Professor, Brandenburg University of Technology - Cottbus & Head, Climate Policy & Development – MCC, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. His research focuses on climate change mitigation in developing and newly-industrializing countries; more specifically he works on interactions between climate change mitigation and sustainable development, drivers of global carbon emissions, energy and economic development, climate policy and policy instruments in developing and emerging economies, political economy and distributional effects of climate policies, and structural change.  From 2007 to 2013 he worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research. Mr. Steckel has authored multiple academic articles and has been an author of the IPCC’s Special Report on Renewables as well as its 5th and 6th Assessment report.

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Carolyn Fischer is a Lead Economist and Research Manager of the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Her research addresses topics of environmental policy instrument design at the intersection with technical change, trade, development, carbon leakage, and overlapping objectives. She has held appointments as a professor of environmental economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and as a Canada 150 Research Chair in Climate Economics, Innovation and Policy at the University of Ottawa. She is a member of the CESifo Research Network and has served on the boards of both the American and European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, as well as the editorial boards of leading environmental economics journals. 

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Somik Lall is Senior Adviser in the Office of the World Bank Group Chief Economist and Director for Development Policy. He was previously Director of the World Bank’s 2024 World Development Report, which examines the challenges of economic growth in middle-income countries. He is also a co-founder of the Growth Academy, a joint initiative between the World Bank and the University of Chicago to advance joint research programs on economic growth with think tanks in emerging economies. Dr. Lall has previously headed initiatives on climate economics and policy, infrastructure investment, urbanization, and territorial and spatial development. Dr. Lall also teaches at Johns Hopkins University and has been a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
Follow him on Twitter: @somikcities

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Shin-Wha Lee, Professor of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Korea University. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland at College and held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Harvard University. She was a research associate at the World Bank, a special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Rwandan Independent Inquiry, chair’s advisor of East Asian Vision Group (EAVG), a visiting scholar at Princeton University, a full-time visiting professor at SIPA, Columbia University, an executive committee member of Academic Council on the UN Studies (ACUNS), international advisory member of GR:EEN(Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks), vice president for international affairs at Korea University, a visiting scholar at Center for International Studies, MIT, and UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Group Member on Peacebuilding Fund(PBF).

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Saravana Ravindran is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is an applied microeconomist with research interests in the economics of developing countries. Saravana's research focuses on the formation and movement of human capital. He has a keen interest in early childhood development programs, their direct and indirect impacts, and aggregate welfare consequences. He also studies challenges and potential policy solutions relating to migration, including mobile banking and digital financial services. Mr. Ravindran received his PhD in Economics from New York University in 2019 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2019 - 2020. He is an affiliated professor of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

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Heiwai Tang holds the Victor and William Fung Professorship in Economics at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he also serves as Director of the Asia Global Institute and Associate Dean for External Relations at the Business School. Before joining HKU, he was a tenured Associate Professor of International Economics at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University. Currently, he is the Managing Editor of the Pacific Economic Review and has previously served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and the China Economic Review. Since 2021, he has been involved with several public and regulatory bodies in Hong Kong SAR, including the Currency Board Sub-Committee of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Exchange Fund Advisory Committee, the Industry Advisory Committee of the Insurance Authority, the Securities and Futures Appeals Tribunal among others.

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Aaditya Mattoo is Chief Economist of the East Asia and Pacific Region of the World Bank. He specializes in development, trade and international cooperation, and provides policy advice to governments. Prior to this, he was Co-Director of the World Development Report 2020 on Global Value Chains, and Research Manager, Trade and International Integration. Before he joined the World Bank, he was Economic Counsellor at the World Trade Organization and taught economics at the University of Sussex and Churchill College, Cambridge University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and an M.Phil in Economics from the University of Oxford. He has published on development, trade, trade in services, and international trade agreements in academic and other journals and his work has been cited in the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, and Time Magazine.

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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, he 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. He 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. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Andrew Dabalen is the World Bank’s Africa Region Chief Economist since July 1, 2022. The Chief Economist is responsible for providing guidance on strategic priorities and the technical quality of economic analysis in the region, as well as for developing major regional economic studies, among other roles. He has held various positions including Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region, Lead Economist and Practice Manager for Poverty and Equity in Africa and most recently, Practice Manager for Poverty and Equity in the South Asia Region. His research and scholarly publications focused on poverty and social impact analysis, inequality of opportunity, program evaluation, risk and vulnerability, labor markets, and conflict and welfare outcomes. He has co-authored regional reports on equality of opportunity for children in Africa, vulnerability and resilience in the Sahel, and poverty in a rising Africa. 

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Johan Swinnen is director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). He is governing board member of the World Agriculture Forum; representative on the High-Level Executive Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC); and a member of the Champions 12.3 Leadership Group to Reduce Food Loss and Waste (SDG Target 12.3) and the Friends of the Alternative Proteins Steering Group. Earlier, he was commissioner on the Food Systems Economics Commission and a co-lead of the Finance Lever of the Food Systems summit. Dr. Swinnen was a Lead Economist at the World Bank from 2003 to 2004 and economic adviser to the European Commission from 1998 to 2001. Dr. Swinnen has been a visiting professor at various universities, including at Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, and a frequent adviser to institutions such as the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

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Leonard Wantchekon, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, is one of the few African economists teaching at a top U.S. university. He studies the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on contemporary African economic developments and examines how citizen engagement can reduce cronyism, improve democratic governance, and lay the groundwork for policies conducive to economic growth. Dr. Wantchekon’s academic initiatives and research projects have been covered by major international media outlets such as the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Jeune Afrique, BBC, Voice of America and Radio France International, among others. He has served as Secretary and later Vice President of the American Political Science Association and on the Executive Committee of the Afrobarometer Network. He is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics, which opened in Benin in 2014.

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Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi is President and CEO of the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), Africa’s leading economic policy institute focused on moving Africa beyond growth and toward transformation. Ms. Owusu-Gyamfi’s career spans over twenty-five years in economic and social policy making and development, across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean working with institutions including the UK Department of International Development, Save the Children, and the Power of Nutrition. Over the last four years as Executive Vice President at ACET, she has been instrumental in crafting ACET’s strategy, and driving its effectiveness and partnerships.  She has helped create a stronger ecosystem of policy institutes across the continent, mobilized essential resources for ACET’s long-term sustainability, and recruited top talent to bolster ACET’s research, advisory, advocacy, and thought leadership capabilities.

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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, he 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. He 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. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Keyu Jin was a tenured professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) for 15 years . She is an academic member of the China Finance 40 Group and has worked with the World Bank, the IMF, and the China Banking Regulatory Commission, and is a non-executive board member of the luxury conglomerate Richemont and Jardine Matheson. Her research is on international economics--- such as why capital flows from poor to rich countries, how the global implications of U.S. monetary and fiscal policies have changed; as well as on how the rise of China impacts the global economy, from several perspectives ---trade, capital flows, global interest rates and saving, demographics,  productivity and technology. Born and raised in Beijing, she attended high school and college in the United States and holds a BA, MA, and PhD in economics from Harvard University.

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Shanta Devarajan is Professor of the Practice of International Development at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He was previously the Senior Director for Development Economics (DEC) and a former Acting Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. Prior to that, he was the Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region. Since joining the World Bank in 1991, he has been a Principal Economist and Research Manager for Public Economics in the Development Research Group, and the Chief Economist of the Human Development Network, the South Asia Region and Africa Region. He was a director of the World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People. Before 1991, he was on the faculty of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

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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 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (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. 

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Laura Schechter is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Before that she was Olav F. and Elsie de Noyer Anderson-Bascom Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at UW-Madison. She is associate editor at the Economic Journal. In 2022 Ms. Schechter finished a six-year term as co-editor at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and In 2019 she finished a three-year term as associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Her work has been covered by NPR’s Planet Money and has been funded by the NSF, IFPRI, PEDL, and ATAI among others. Her work has been published in top general interest economics journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Economic Journal, as well as in top agricultural economics journals such as American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, and in top development economics journals such as Journal of Development Economics. 

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Tom Vogl is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-San Diego. He studies population, health, and human capital, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. His current research projects focus on the drivers of fertility change in Africa, the health and human capital impacts of social program retrenchment in Latin America, and the anatomy of global poverty decline. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics and recently served on the National Academies Committee on Women’s Empowerment, Population Dynamics, and Socioeconomic Development. His recent work has investigated the aggregate consequences of changing differential fertility, the causes and consequences of early-life health, and the long-term effects of anti-poverty programs.

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Rachel Glennerster is the president of the Center for Global Development. Prior to joining CGD, she was at the University of Chicago. She has leveraged randomized trials to address critical issues spanning democracy, health, education, and women's empowerment and pioneered ways to shape markets to promote innovation to address global challenges including pandemics and climate change. She has also written on strategies to stimulate innovation, promoting more equitable access to vaccines, and the response to Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics. Dr. Glennerster previously served as Chief Economist at the Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for International Development in the UK. In 2021, Dr. Glennerster was appointed Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) for services in international development. She also currently serves as the Chair of Teaching at the Right Level Africa (TaRL Africa).

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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, he 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. He 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. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Dr. Arvind Panagariya is the Chairman of Sixteenth Finance Commission of India and Professor of Economics and the Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University. From January 2015 to August 2017, he served as the first Vice Chairman of the NITI Aayog, Government of India, in the rank of a Cabinet Minister, and during this period, he also served as India’s G20 Sherpa, leading the Indian teams that negotiated the G20 Communiqués under the presidencies of Turkey (2015), China (2016), and Germany (2017). Dr. Panagariya, a former Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank, was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland at College Park from 1978 to 2003 and worked with the World Bank, IMF, and UNCTAD in various capacities. He has authored more than fifteen books, including India: The Emerging Giant (2008, OUP, New York), which The Economist listed as a top pick of 2008 and Fareed Zakaria described as the “definitive book on the Indian economy,” and Why Growth Matters (with Jagdish Bhagwati), described by The Economist as “a manifesto for policymakers and analysts.” 

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Oriana Bandiera is the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE), and a honorary foreign member of the American Economic Association, a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, CEPR, BREAD and IZA.  She is director of the Hub for Equal Representation at the LSE and of the Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries (G²LM|LIC) programme at IZA.  She serves on the council of the Econometric Society, on board of the International Growth Centre and of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Her research has been awarded the IZA Young Labor Economist Prize (2008), the Carlo Alberto Medal (2011), the Ester Boserup Prize (2018), the  Yrjö Jahnsson Award(2019), the Arrow Award (2021) and a Honorary Doctorate in Economics from the University of Munich (2021). At the LSE she teaches the undergraduate Development Economics course, for which she won a Student Union Award in 2020.

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Jishnu Das is a distinguished professor of public policy at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Mr. Das's work focuses on health and education in low and middle-income countries. He has co-developed one of the largest and longest-running cohort studies on learning outcomes in low-income countries and leads an agenda on quality of healthcare in low-income countries. His research led to the widespread adoption of a training program for informal providers (in West Bengal), health facility inspections (in Kenya), networks for private sector providers (in India), the scale-up of quality measurement tools in health (global) and the development of financial products for private schools (global). He was also part of the team that developed India’s federal inpatient health insurance scheme, the RSBY, which reached 150 million people in 2016. 

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Leonard Wantchekon, a professor at Princeton University, is one of the few African economists teaching at a top U.S. university. He studies the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on contemporary African economic developments and examines how citizen engagement can reduce cronyism, improve democratic governance, and lay the groundwork for policies conducive to economic growth. Dr. Wantchekon’s academic initiatives and research projects have been covered by major international media outlets such as the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Jeune Afrique, BBC, Voice of America and Radio France International, among others. He has served as Secretary and later Vice President of the American Political Science Association and on the Executive Committee of the Afrobarometer Network. He is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics, which opened in Benin in 2014.

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Markus Goldstein is Vice President and Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. Prior to joining CGD, Mr. Goldstein was at Amazon where he led research teams building human resources solutions. Earlier in his career, as Lead Economist at the World Bank, he founded and led the Africa Gender Innovation Lab, where his research informed policies across 56 countries and influenced over $10 billion in development investments. A development economist with experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South Asia, his research examined issues of gender and economic activity, focusing on agriculture and small scale enterprises. Mr. Goldstein has taught at the University of Ghana, London School of Economics, and Georgetown University. His expertise spans poverty reduction, gender equity, firm growth, agricultural productivity and health.

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Christina Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. Prior to this, Ms. Brown was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute. She received a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and worked as a consultant for the World Bank and Save the Children. She is a development economist studying labor and behavioral economics questions, and her research examines labor and education market imperfections, especially around issues of asymmetric information. Prior to working as a researcher, Brown taught high school physics. 

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Lee Crawfurd is a senior research fellow at the Center for Global Development. His research focuses on education policy in low and middle income countries. He provided research assistance to the RISE programme and continues to contribute to a variety of research initiatives related to improving education systems. Previously he was an advisor with government in Rwanda, South Sudan, and the UK, and a consultant for international organisations and NGOs such as the World Bank, AfDB, and ADB. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Sussex and has studied at the University of Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

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Dev Patel is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard and a Postdoctoral Fellow at J-PAL at MIT. He studies development and environmental economics, focusing on climate change adaptation, gender, and education. In 2026, he will join the Brown Department of Economics and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society as an Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 2024.

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Gabriela Smarrelli is a senior research associate at the Center for Global Development’s global education program. Ms. Smarrelli's primary research fields include development economics, economics of education and public service delivery in low-middle-income countries. Her work currently investigates the barriers to human capital formation, particularly those imposed by the prevalence of school violence and restrictive social norms. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, an MPA in Public and Economic Policy from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Economics from Universidad del Pacifico in Peru. Before joining CGD, she worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford Policy Management, and Apoyo Consultoria.

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Deon Filmer is Director of the Research Group at the World Bank. He has previously served as Acting Research Manager in the Research Group, Co-Director of the World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, and Lead Economist in the Human Development department of the Africa Region of the World Bank. He works on issues of human capital and skills, service delivery, and the impact of policies and programs to improve human development outcomes—with research spanning the areas of education, health, social protection, and poverty and inequality. He has recently co-authored the following books: Making Schools Work: New Evidence from Accountability Reforms, Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds: Turning Sub-Saharan Africa's Natural Resource Wealth into Human Capital. He was a core team member of the World Bank's World Development Reports in 1995 Workers in an Integrating World and 2004 Making Services Work for Poor People, and a contributor to 2007’s report Development and the Next Generation. 

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Chris Barrett is an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University. He is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and an International Professor of Agriculture at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, as well as a Professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Faculty Director of the Cornell Collaboration on International Development Economics Research, a Senior Faculty Fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Institute for Food Systems. His more than 375 publications have been cited more than 63,000 times, placing him among the top five scholars globally in the agricultural economics, development economics, food security, poverty, and resource economics fields, according to Google Scholar, well within the top 1 percent of all economists worldwide according to RePEc/IDEAS, and in the top 50 economics and finance scholars globally per research.com. 

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Kathy Baylis is a Professor in the department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She joined the department in 2020 after more than a decade in the department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois where she remains adjunct faculty. In 2001-2002, Ms. Baylis was the staff economist in charge of agriculture for the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House, and in the mid-1990s, she worked as Executive Secretary of the National Farmers Union in Canada. Her research evaluates agricultural, conservation and trade policies and their effect on environmental and food security outcomes. She has helped bring in over $30 million in grants, and has supervised over 30 graduate and post-doctoral students. She has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters on agriculture, trade, and environmental policy. 

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William Masters is Professor in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics at Tufts. He is coauthor of Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and since 2020 has led the Food Prices for Nutrition project that introduced new metrics for the cost and affordability of healthy diets worldwide. He also directs Tufts University activities in support of the ANH Academy, and his courses on economics of agriculture, food and nutrition were recognized with student-nominated, University-wide teaching awards in 2019 and 2022. He is an elected Fellow of both the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (since 2020) and the American Society for Nutrition (since 2025). 

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Kibrom Tafere is an Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the Development Research Group, World Bank. His research interests are in the areas of development and applied microeconomics, with especial focus on the links between policy and environmental shocks and education, health, food security and agricultural productivity. His current research studies the effects of access to healthcare on health, schooling and agricultural productivity; the long-term and inter-generational effects of childhood shocks; the effects of global health emergencies on food security and maternal and child health, and the targeting of social protection programs. His research spans a range of middle income and developing countries including Brazil, Ethiopia, India, and Uganda. He holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Cornell University.

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Eeshani Kandpal is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD). Prior to this, she was a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. Her research aims to inform development policy to improve maternal and child outcomes along three main themes. In the first theme, she studies the design and impacts of cash transfers to poor households. In the second theme, she examines the design and impacts of pay-for-performance contracts to improve health worker effort and the provision of maternal and child health care. The third theme of her research examines the household-level determinants of investments in women’s human capital as well as the varied interactions between gender and social capital, such as the role of peer effects in intrahousehold decision-making.

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Wendy Cunningham is a Lead Economist in World Bank’s Human Capital Project, where she leads the program on demographics for economic development. During her 20 years at the World Bank, Ms. Cunningham has carried out research and provided operational support on issues related to jobs, labor markets, socio-emotional skills, youth development, and gender in the World Bank’s Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Pacific, and Latin America and Caribbean regions. She has a Ph.D. in labor economics from the University of Illinois, and publishes in economics, education, and psychology journals.

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ÇAĞLAR ÖZDEN is the Deputy Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the World Bank. Prior, he was a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group and co-director of the 2023 World Development. He was the co-author of recent World Bank report “Global Skill Partnerships” and lead author of the Policy Research Report “Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets”. A Turkish national, Mr. Özden received his undergraduate degrees in economics and industrial engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. He is a fellow of Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), and the Economic Research Forum. His current research projects explore the determinants and patterns of global labor mobility, brain drain, internal migration, ageing and demographic trends, and linkages between labor, trade, and foreign direct investment flows.

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Caroline Theoharides is an Associate Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at Amherst College. She received a Ph.D. in economics and public policy from the University of Michigan in 2014 and a B.A. in economics from Colby College in 2006. Her research focuses on labor markets in developing countries, using both quasi-experimental methods and randomized controlled trials. Her previous research examines the effects of economic shocks in destination countries on demand for migrants and their wages. She is particularly interested in topics surrounding international migration and its impacts on origin countries, child labor, and human capital accumulation.

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Dany Bahar is the director and senior fellow for the migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy program at the Center for Global Development (CGD). His research sits at the intersection of international economics and economic development. In particular, his academic research focuses on the diffusion of technology and knowledge within and across borders, as measured by productivity, structural transformation, exports, entrepreneurship and innovation, among other factors. Lately, his research has focused on migrants and refugees as drivers of this process and, more broadly, on the benefits that migrants and refugees bring to both their countries of origin and destination. His academic work has been published in top economic journals, and he often contributes to leading media outlets in the United States and around the globe.

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Mamta Murthi is Vice President for the People Vice Presidency at the World Bank, a role she assumed on July 1, 2020. In this role she oversees the Global Practices for Education; Health, Nutrition, and Population; Gender; Social Protection and Jobs – as well as the Human Capital Project. Mamta has held many leadership positions at the World Bank, including as Director of Operations Policy (2019), Director of Strategy and Operations in Infrastructure (2018), Director of Strategy and Operations in the Africa Region (2015-2018), and Regional Country Director for the EU, based in Brussels (2012-15).  An economist by training, she has had technical roles in Social Protection and Labor (1996-2004) and Education (2006-10). She was Deputy Director of the World Development Report on Development and the Next Generation in 2006. During 1998-2000, Mamta was MacArthur Fellow for Poverty and Inequality at King’s College, Cambridge.

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