Diego Zardetto is a Senior Statistician for the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), the World Bank’s flagship household survey program housed at the Development Data Group. An Italian national, he joined the World Bank in April 2021, when he was assigned to the Rome-based Center for Development Data (C4D2). His work focuses on improving official statistics in developing countries, both through applying methodological best practices to complex production scenarios and through devising suitable methods in resource-constrained and data-scarce environments where established approaches may not be viable.
Diego’s research interests include survey sampling and estimation, data integration, machine learning, and nontraditional data sources. He is also committed to developing free, open-source, user-friendly, and standardized statistical software as a vehicle for fostering the use of the results of his research and strengthening the statistical capacity of clients and partners, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
Prior to joining the World Bank, Diego served for 18 years as an official statistician at the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), working in the role of statistical methodologist, initially in the Population Census Directorate (four years) and then in the Methodology Directorate (fourteen years). He was a member of Istat’s Methodology Advisory Committee and Quality Committee and was Istat’s representative within the Task Force on Big Data of the European Statistical System led by Eurostat.
A theoretical physicist by academic education, Diego holds a cum laude Laurea Magistrale (Italian M. Sc.) in Physics from the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”
