François Bourguignon

François Bourguignon (born May 22, 1945) is the former Chief Economist (2003-2007) of the World Bank. He is the Director of the Paris School of Economics.

Francois Bourguignon, a global authority on the economics of growth and development, played a vital role in placing economic growth and its relationship with inequality and income distribution and poverty at the center of the World Bank’s agenda.

Bourguignon is a French national and studied at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique (ENSAE) and the University of Paris VI, where he earned a post-graduate degree in Applied Mathematics (1973). He went on to earn a Ph.D. and the Merrit Brown Award for the best thesis at the University of Western Ontario, Canada (1975), and a Doctorate in Economics at the University of Orleans in France (1979).

He was also the professor of Economics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and founded and directed the Département et laboratoire d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (DELTA), a research unit in theoretical and applied economics.

As World Bank's Senior Vice President for Development Economics and Chief Economist (often just referred to as the "Chief Economist"), he contributed to placing economic growth and its relationship with inequalities, and evaluation of the development impact of programs and policies at the center of the Bank’s research agenda.

Since 1985, he has been Professor of Economics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. There he founded and directed the Département et Laboratoire d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (DELTA), a research unit in theoretical and applied economics. He has also held academic positions at the University of Chile, University of Toronto, and Bocconi University. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and was president of the European Economic Association for Population Economics. He received the silver medal for academic achievements from the French National Centre of Scientific Research in 1999. He has authored or edited several books and over one hundred articles in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory and Journal for Development Economics. In addition to being the managing editor of the World Bank Economic Review from 2000-03, and European Economic Review (1990-2000), he has been an associate editor of several other important economic journals, including the Review of Economic Studies (1982-1987), Annales d'Economie et de Statistiques (1988-1991), and the Journal of Public Economics, (1991-1997).

Recent publications

* Handbook of Income Distribution (edited with Anthony Atkinson), North-Holland, 2000.
* The Impact of Economic Policies on Poverty and Income Distribution: Evaluation Techniques and Tools (edited with Luiz Pereira da Silva), World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003
* The Microeconomics of Income Distribution Dynamics in East Asia and Latin America. (edited with Francisco Ferreira and Nora Lustig), World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2004
* Evaluating the poverty impact of economic policies: some analytical challenges, (with Luiz Pereira da Silva and Nicholas Stern), Macroeconomic policies and poverty reduction, edited by Ashoka Mody New York : Routledge, 2005.
* The Effect of Economic Growth on Social Structures, in Philippe Aghion and Steven Durlauf (eds), Handbook of Economic Growth, North-Holland, 2005.
* Equity, Efficiency and Inequality Traps. A Research Agenda (with Francisco H.G. Ferrera and Michael Walton), Journal of Economic Inequality, August 2007, Vol. 5, No. 2: 235-256.
* Effectiveness—Opening the Black Box (with Mark Sundberg), The American Economic Review, May 2007, Vol. 97, No. 2, 316-320.