About the Speaker
Luis Felipe López-Calva is the Director of the Poverty Global Department in the Prosperity Vertical at the World Bank. He has over 25 years of professional experience working with international institutions and advising national governments. He rejoined the World Bank in 2022 from the United Nations Development Programme, where he served as UN Assistant Secretary General and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean since 2018.
In his previous tenure at the World Bank, he held various technical and managerial positions in the Latin American and Europe and Central Asia regions. He was the Co-Director and Lead Author of the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law. At The World Bank, he has led lending operations for 1.1 billion USD.
López-Calva is the vice-chair of the Board at the Global Development Network (GDN), a member of the Council at the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ), a Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, and a member of the Global Futures Council on the Economics of Equitable Transition at the World Economic Forum (WEF). He has held research and teaching positions at El Colegio de Mexico, UDLAP, ITESM-Mexico. He has also held visiting scholar, research and teaching positions at University of California-San Diego, Harvard University (Ivy League Exchange Scholar), Stanford University (Stanford Center for International Development), and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER, United Nations University).
His research interests focus on labor markets, poverty and inequality, institutions, and the microeconomics of development. He has published on these issues in peer-reviewed academic journals, such as The Journal of Development Economics, The Journal of Economic Inequality, World Development, Economics Letters, Oxford Economic Papers, and Oxford Development Studies, among others. He has also authored and edited widely cited books and policy reports. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Boston University, as well as a Master’s and a PhD in Economics from Cornell University.
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