Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics 2023: Growth and Resilience

Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. He brings to the role a broad combination of leadership, expertise, and practical experience working with governments on macroeconomic imbalances, growth, poverty, institutions, conflict, and climate change.

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 played a key role in shaping 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 is widely regarded for his contributions to development economics. He spearheaded the influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His pioneering 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

Manuela Francisco is the Global Director for the Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment (MTI) Global Practice in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions Practice Group (GGEVP), a position she started on 1 January 2023.

Ms. Francisco, a Portuguese national, joined the World Bank in 2005 as Country Economist in the Africa Department. She has since held various positions of responsibility in the Bank. Prior to her current position, she was the Director of Credit Risk, in the Chief Risk Officer Vice Presidency, and before that, she was the Practice Manager for MTI in the South Asia Region.

Before joining the Bank, Ms. Francisco was an Assistant Professor at Universidade do Minho, Portugal.

Ms. Francisco has a PhD in Economics, International Macroeconomics from the University of Nottingham.

Yongseok Shin is the Douglass C. North Distinguished Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his BA from Seoul National University in 1999, and his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2004. He is a Research Fellow of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Michael Grubb is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College London, following positions at Imperial College London and then Cambridge University. His career has combined academic with half-time implementation roles. Following eight years as Chief Economist at the UK Carbon Trust, the UK’s lead organisation for business implementation, he was Senior Advisor to the UK Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (the energy regulator, Ofgem), and then Chaired the UK government’s Panel of Technical Experts on Electricity Market Reform.

His book Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development, won the 2021 Marcel Boiteux prize for “outstanding book contributing to energy economics and its literature” by International Association for Energy Economics.  Prof Grubb was one of the original members of the UK’s statutory Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on future carbon budgets and reports to Parliament on their implementation. He has contributed to several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 2018 was appointed as Convening Lead Author for Chapter 1 of the Sixth Assessment Report - Mitigation. 

Doug Gollin is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Oxford University. His research focusses on economic development and growth, with particular interests in agriculture and structural transformation. His work brings a general equilibrium perspective to issues such as: sectoral differences in productivity; the impacts of agricultural technologies; the role of transport costs in shaping spatial patterns of development; the importance of small firms and self employment in poor countries; and the macroeconomic effects of disease.

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 published widely in refereed journals, including studies of the impact of demand-side programs on schooling and learning; the roles of poverty, gender, orphanhood, and disability in explaining education inequalities; and the determinants of effective service delivery. 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. He holds a PhD and MA from Brown University and a BA from Tufts University.

Norman Loayza is Director of the Global Indicators Group at the World Bank. 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. A few examples include business environment and economic performance in Latin America; informal and formal labor markets in the Middle East and Northern Africa; public infrastructure gaps in Pakistan and Egypt; savings for macroeconomic stability and growth in Sri Lanka, Georgia, and Egypt; and pro-poor growth in Indonesia and Peru. 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).

Philip Wollburg is an Economist in the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team of the World Bank’s Development Data Group and a core team member for the World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives. His research focuses on agriculture, poverty, health, and climate change, as well as improving survey and measurement methods.

David Newhouse is a Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Development Economics Data Group and a fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics. His work has focused on economic measurement, including integrating survey data with non-traditional data, and analysis related to poverty and jobs in developing countries. He currently leads the Data Fusion Group, which promotes integration across different sources of data for the purposes of small area estimation and nowcasting. He holds a PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has published many articles in respected journals on statistics, labor, poverty, health, and education in developing countries.  

Alison Campion is a PhD student in Economics and Public Policy at Tufts University. Prior to starting at Tufts, she worked on household resilience and food security in East Africa as a data scientist at Kimetrica (now AIR). Most recently, she was a research associate at Development Data Lab working on several projects, including developing a new open data platform with the Indian government to host all administrative data in a single, harmonized schema. She holds a BA in Geosciences from Princeton University.

Shoumitro Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor of International Economics at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are at the intersection of development economics and international trade.

Chatterjee is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Previously he has been a faculty at the Pennsylvania State University and Georgetown University. In 2015-16 he served as an Economist in the Office of the Chief Economic Advisor of India.

As Global Director for Gender, Hana Brixi leads a global effort to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. She sets the overall direction for the World Bank Group’s Gender knowledge agenda, drives Bank-wide efforts for results in closing gender gaps, and fosters partnerships with public and private sector stakeholders toward innovations at scale.

In her career, Ms. Brixi has contributed to advances in human development, public finance, and governance. As Manager of the Human Capital Project, she led a global effort to protect and invest in people with an emphasis on girls and women empowerment. Prior to this, she held managerial and leadership positions in the Social Protection & Jobs and Governance Global Practices and in the Middle East & North Africa, East Asia & Pacific, and Europe & Central Asia regions. Based in China during 2001-10, she also served as World Health Organization’s Manager and UNICEF Chief in China. 

Ms. Brixi has published articles in professional journals and written several books on economic development, including Trust, Voice and Incentives on service delivery and Government at Risk on fiscal management. She holds graduate degrees in physics and economic policy from Masaryk University and Princeton University, respectively.

Aart Kraay is the World Bank Group Deputy Chief Economist and Director of Development Policy in the Development Economics Vice-Presidency of the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 1995 after earning a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University (1995), and a B.Sc. in economics from the University of Toronto (1990). His research interests include macroeconomics in developing countries; international capital movements; growth, poverty and inequality; institutions and governance; and applied econometrics. His research on these topics has been published in scholarly journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal:  Macroeconomics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Economic Growth. He is a member of the editorial board of the World Bank Research Observer, former co-editor of the World Bank Economic Review, and an associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics. He has held visiting positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and has taught at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Arturo Herrera Gutierrez is the Global Director for Governance Global Practice in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions Practice Group (EFI) Vice Presidency.

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.

As Global Director for Governance, Mr. Herrera’s priorities include leading the formulation of strategy and engagement of the Bank’s work on public institutions and 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 Governance Practice’s 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.

Soukeyna Kane is Director of the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) Group at the World Bank. She is responsible for leading a team of dedicated professionals to deliver strategic, operational, and analytical support to the World Bank Group's work on FCV issues. Ms. Kane also represents the Bank in global fora and manages relationships around the FCV agenda with the donor community and other stakeholders.

Previously, she served as Country Director for Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, leading the coordination and delivery of WBG strategy and operations in those countries and the Sahel more broadly. Prior to that, Ms. Kane was Practice Manager for Governance in the East and Central Asia region for 5 years. 

Ms. Kane, a Senegalese national, joined the Bank in March 2003 as a Senior Financial Management Specialist and also held positions in the Africa Region, Operations Policy and Country Services (OPCS), Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region.

Quy-Toan (Toan) Do is the Co-Director for the 2023 World Development Report and a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group. His research focuses on Fragility, Conflict and Violence with an emphasis on conflict, crime, and forced displacement. He is the lead author of the recent Policy Research Report Violence without Borders: the Internationalization of Crime and Conflict. He holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and an MA from Ecole Polytechnique (France).

Sandra Rozo is a Senior Economist in the Poverty and Inequality Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank. Her research centers on exploring the effects of forced migration within hosting economies and of the role of public policies in supporting these migrants and their hosting communities. Her work aims to advance our knowledge in three areas: (i) the economic and political impacts of forced migration in developing countries and the mechanisms driving those effects, (ii) the impacts of humanitarian interventions that aim at supporting migrants and locals, and (iii) how to increase social cohesion between migrants and locals. Some of her recent research papers have been published in the Journal of Labor Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics. Recent research projects include collecting a representative sample of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia to evaluate the impacts of a large amnesty offered to undocumented migrants. She is also part of the research team collecting the Syrian Life Refugee Study, the first representative panel of Syrian refugees being presently collected in Jordan and has also been recently implementing experiments to reduce prejudice and improve prosocial behaviors toward migrants. Sandra is also an IZA research fellow, a CEGA-UC Berkeley faculty affiliate, and a USC-CESR research fellow.

Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln is programme director of the macroeconomics and growth programme at the CEPR, chairwoman of the Review of Economic Studies, and elected fellow of the Econometric Society. She received the 2018 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Science Foundation, the highest scientific award in Germany, and the 2016 Gossen Prize of the German Economic Association. In 2018, she was also awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant, and in 2010 an ERC Starting Grant. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and of the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts. She holds many affiliations in international research networks.

Kathleen Beegle is Research Manager and Lead Economist in the Human Development Team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. Her research experience includes the study of poverty, labor, economic shocks, and methodological studies on household survey data collection in developing countries. She has expertise in the design and implementation of household surveys and their use for poverty and policy analysis.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, World Bank Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Human Resources, and Demography. She is co-author of numerous chapters in books and is co-lead of several World Bank reports including Realizing the Full Potential of Safety Nets in Africa, Poverty in A Rising Africa, Accelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa, and the World Development Report 2013 on Jobs.

She was previously in the Research Group from 2001-2013. In the interim, she was the Lead Economist with the Gender Group (2018-2021), the Human Development Program Leader for Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, based in Accra, Ghana (2014-2018), and a Lead Economist in the Africa Chief Economist Office (2013-2014). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University and competed a post-doctoral fellowship at RAND.

Susan M. Lund is IFC’s Vice President for Economics and Private Sector Development. She leads a large staff of economists that provide economic analysis to support IFC investments, including macroeconomic outlooks, country risk assessments, and country private sector diagnostics. She is also responsible for the Anticipated Impact Measurement and Monitoring framework (AIMM) to assess the development impact of IFC investments; identifying opportunities to use blended concessional finance to enable investments in the lowest-income and fragile nations; and overseeing IFC’s research and thought leadership.

Prior to joining IFC, Ms. Lund spent over 20 years as a partner at McKinsey & Company and leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. In that role, she served as both 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, financial market development, and technology and the future of work. Widely cited in the global media, Ms. Lund frequently speaks at international conferences and regularly writes articles and op-eds for leading business publications.

Ms. Lund, a U.S. national, served on IFC’s Economic Advisory Board. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Association of Business Economists, and the Bretton Woods Committee. She holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University.

Carolyn Kousky is Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy at Environmental Defense Fund. Dr. Kousky’s research examines multiple aspects of climate risk management and policy approaches for increasing resilience. She is the author of Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future and an editor of A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation. She has published numerous articles, reports, and book chapters on the economics and policy of climate risk and disaster finance and she is routinely cited in media outlets. She is the vice-chair of the California Climate Insurance Working Group, a member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance at the U.S. Department of Treasury, a non-resident senior fellow in the Brookings Metro program, a university fellow at Resources for the Future, a non-resident scholar at the Insurance Information Institute, and a member of the Roundtable on Risk and Resilience of Extreme Events at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She was previously Executive Director at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a BS in Earth Systems from Stanford University and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.