The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced on Tuesday the departure of its chief economist, Gita Gopinath, after three years in the organization. Head of the Fund’s research department, Gopinath, of Indian origin, will leave the IMF next January and will rejoin the Department of Economics at Harvard University, as planned. The university extended its leave of absence “for exceptional reasons” by one year, which ends at the end of December.
The Fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, has raved about Gopinath, “the IMF’s first chief economist.” “His contribution to the Fund has been truly remarkable and his impact on the work of the IMF enormous. She has made history as the first female chief economist and we have all benefited from her keen intelligence and deep understanding of international finance and macroeconomics as we navigate through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, ”reads the farewell message from Georgieva, according to the statement released by the entity on Tuesday.
Gopinath was a co-author of the Pandemic Document, a roadmap to vaccinate the world. The document led to the creation of a multilateral working group, made up of the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to facilitate responses to the health emergency through collaboration with vaccine manufacturers to identify trade barriers, supply bottlenecks, and accelerate delivery of vials to low- and middle-income countries.
The consonance of Gopinath and Georgieva within the institution has been notorious. Facilitating access to vaccines in the most lagging economies is one of the goals of Georgieva’s controversial mandate. Another is to establish the priority of combating climate change, something to which Gopinath has also contributed thanks to the creation of a specific working group to study and analyze, among other purposes, policies to mitigate global warming.
An American citizen belonging to the large Indian diaspora in the country – equally numerous in the academic field of the United States – Gopinath’s curriculum is a compendium of achievements. He has published in the most important economic newspapers in the world; taught at the University of Chicago Business School before making the leap to Harvard and advised, among others, the Bank of New York, the Indian Ministry of Economy or the Head of Government of the Indian State of Kerala, if Well, he was deprived of nationality when he assumed that of the United States and he only keeps, like the rest of his fellow citizens, a permanent residence permit in his country of origin. It also belongs to the Group of Thirty, or G30, a major Washington-based think tank.
The process of selecting his replacement at the IMF will begin shortly, according to the entity’s statement.
Subscribe here to the newsletter from EL PAÍS América and receive all the informative keys of the current situation of the region
#IMF #announces #departure #Gita #Gopinath #IMFs #chief #economist