Brief Biography

Contact Information

Email: ssmith@gwu.edu

Address:
The George Washington University
Economics Department
Monroe Hall 340
2115 G Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Stephen C. Smith is Chair of the Department of Economics, and Professor of Economics and International Affairs. He also served as the Director of IIEP from 2009-2012, and 2015-2017. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University and has been a UNICEF Senior Research Fellow, a Fulbright Research Scholar, a Jean Monnet Research Fellow, an IZA Research Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, a Fulbright Senior Specialist, a member of the Advisory Council of BRAC USA, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. In the 1990s, he designed and served as first director of GW’s International Development Studies Program. 

He is Principal Investigator for the research project, “Complementarities of Training, Technology, and Credit in Smallholder Agriculture: Impact, Sustainability, and Policy for Scaling-up in Senegal and Uganda,” funded by BASIS / USAID.

From 2004-2008, he served as co-Principal Investigator, along with Prof. Jim Williams, of GW’s partnership with BRAC University (in Bangladesh).

Smith has done on-site research and program work in several regions of the developing world including Bangladesh, China, Ecuador, India, Senegal, Slovenia, and Uganda. He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the International Labour Office (ILO, Geneva), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), USAID, and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (UN-WIDER, Helsinki). Smith has also conducted extensive research on the economics of employee participation, including works councils, ESOPs, and labor cooperatives, which has included on-site research in Italy, Spain, and Germany.

Publications

Smith is the co-author with Michael Todaro of Economic Development (13th Ed., Pearson, 2020); the author of Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2009); and co-editor with Jennifer Brinkerhoff and Hildy Teegen of NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Smith is also author or coauthor of some 50 journal articles, and numerous book chapters and other publications. Details on some of these publications and downloadable working papers may be found on Google Scholar, RePEc, or his research paper page.