The World Bank has appointed Carmen Reinhart as its new Vice President and Chief Economist, effective from 15 June 2020. Announcing the decision, David Malpass, World Bank Group President said, “Carmen has dedicated her career to understanding and surmounting financial crises in both advanced and developing economies in order to achieve growth and higher living standards. Her thought leadership during this unprecedented period will be invaluable to the Bank Group and our clients.”
Reinhart has a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Earlier, she was with the Peterson Institute for International Economics and University of Maryland.
Reinhart’s areas of expertise are international capital flows, finance, and macroeconomics, and she has published extensively on economies in Asia and Latin America, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. She is an advisor and contributor to the ongoing World Bank debt transparency discussions and a member of the external advisory group created by the IMF to provide input on policy challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic and its economic impact.
Reinhart has been listed in Bloomberg Markets’ Most Influential 50 in Finance, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Thomson Reuters’ The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. In 2018 she was awarded the King Juan Carlos Prize in Economics and NABE’s Adam Smith Award, among others.
To central bankers and bank supervisors, she will be best known as the co-author, with Kenneth Rogoff, of “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Follow”, a masterly analysis of financial crises across centuries. The book had received wide critical acclaim when it was published. Carmen Reinhart is joining the World Bank at a time of crisis, and can be expected play a lead role in the post-Covid economic resurgence.
© G Sreekumar 2021
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