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Working to lower remittance fees and provide innovative financing solutions for people, businesses, and governments |
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About me |
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I am an economist specializing in migration, remittances
and innovative financing. Currently I'm developing a low-cost remittance
platform originally proposed in my TED Talk, while concurrently working on
market-based financing solutions for poor households, small businesses, and
low- and middle-income countries. Related
work includes remittance-linked loans, bonds and
insurance products; diaspora bonds; and harnessing diaspora philanthropy.
Relevant innovative financing tools include shadow sovereign ratings for
unrated countries and future-flow securitization (of payment rights and other
future flows) to access capital markets during a financial crisis. In
2012, I founded KNOMAD,
a global knowledge hub on migration, and in 2010, co-founded Migrating
out of Poverty Research Consortium with its HQ at the
University of Sussex. Around the same time, I also conceived the idea of the
Africa Institute for Remittances. I serve as focal point on migration,
remittances and diaspora bonds for the World Bank, and a co-coordinator of
the Global Remittances Working Group that grew out of the G7 and the G20
processes. During
2009-2015, I participated in the World Economic Forum global agenda council
on migration. In 2015 I was affiliated with South Asia Institute, Harvard
University as a Senior Visiting Fellow, and during 2011-13, with University
of Sussex as a Visitor Professor of Economics. I served as the chair of the
advisory group of Migrating out of Poverty Consortium during 2014-17, and as
a member of the first advisory committee of the Migration Policy Center of
European University Institute, Florence. Prior
to joining the World Bank, I worked as a regional economist for Asia at
Credit Agricole Indosuez, Singapore where I advised institutional investors
on Asian equity, fixed income and foreign exchange
markets. I have also worked as an assistant professor of economics at the
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and as an economist at the Policy
Group, New Delhi. I have a Ph.D. in economics from the Indian Statistical
Institute, New Delhi where I also worked as a visiting lecturer and helped
build a CGE planning model for India.
“No one
has done more than Mr. Ratha to make migration and its potential rewards a
top-of-the-agenda concern in the world’s development ministries,” wrote Jason DeParle in “World Banker and
His Cash Return Home,” New York Times, March 17,
2008. (Photo taken from the same article – shows a classroom in Sindhekela High School where I
studied.) Since
the publication of my article on the significance of remittances in 2003, I
have been fortunate enough to participate in all UN-level high-level forums
on migration: Global Commission on International Migration, 10 Global Forums
on Migration and Development, and three UN High-Level Dialogues on migration.
During 2013-2015, I was able to contribute to the advocacy for including
migration in the post-2015 development agenda. The Sustainable
Development Goals now include targets to reduce remittance costs and
recruitment costs, and I continue to lead, with others, the efforts to
achieve these targets. I blog
on PeopleMove. |
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