Nancy Birdsall
President Emeritus and Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Nancy Birdsall is president emeritus and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a policy-oriented research institution that opened its doors in Washington, DC in October 2001. Prior to launching the Center, Birdsall served for three years as senior associate and director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on reforming international financial institutions. Birdsall was the executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. Before joining the IADB, she spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank. Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs, and author of over 100 published papers. Her most recent work focuses on global governance and the international financial institutions, women’s empowerment and its relationship to reproductive choices, and the financing of global public goods for development.
Pedro Conceição
Director, Human Development Report Office, UNDP
Pedro Conceição is the lead author of UNDP’s Human Development Report. Prior, he served as Director, Strategic Policy, at the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (from October 2014), and Chief Economist and Head of the Strategic Advisory Unit at the Regional Bureau for Africa (from 1 December 2009). Before that, he was Director of the Office of Development Studies (ODS) from March 2007 to November 2009, and Deputy Director of ODS, from October 2001 to February 2007. His work on financing for development and on global public goods was published by Oxford University Press in books he co-edited (The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges, 2006; Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization, 2003). He has published on inequality, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in several journals. Prior to joining to UNDP, he was an Assistant Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal.
Anandi Mani
Professor of Behavioural Economics and Public Policy, Oxford University
Anandi Mani is Professor of Behavioural Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. Her research interests are in the area of development economics, with a specific focus on issues related to the behavioral economics of poverty and social exclusion, gender issues and public good provision. She is a Research Affiliate at Ideas42, a think tank for behavioral economics at Harvard University, and a Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at the University of Warwick. Her recent work has been published in prominent economics journals and has also featured in leading newspapers including The New York Times and The Guardian, as well as the BBC. Professor Mani was a program participant at the World Economic Forum 2017 in Davos and is a member of the Forum's Global Council on the Future of Behavioral Sciences.
Martin Ravallion
Edmond D. Villani Professor of Economics, Georgetown University
Martin Ravallion holds the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown in 2013 he was Director of the World Bank’s research department, the Development Research Group. Martin worked in almost all sectors and regions of the World Bank for over 24 years. Prior to joining the Bank, he was on the faculty of the Australian National University. He has taught economics at L.S.E., Oxford University, the Australian National University, Princeton University and the Paris School of Economics. Martin’s main research interests over the last 30 years have concerned poverty and policies for fighting it.
