Gita Gopinath keynote speaker

Gita Gopinath is a globally respected economist and former First Deputy Managing Director and Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, available as a keynote speaker for banks, asset managers, corporates, governments and policy forums. Organisations book Gita Gopinath as a speaker to make sense of global growth, inflation, public debt and geopolitical risk, and to give their senior leadership a clear, evidence-based view of what comes next for the world economy.

Dr. Gita Gopinath is the Gregory and Ania Coffey Professor of Economics at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading voices on international finance and macroeconomics. She previously served as First Deputy Managing Director and Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), experience she now brings directly to audiences as a sought-after keynote speaker on the global economy.

Her research focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics where she is a leading voice on dollar dominance, exchange rates, trade and investment, international financial crises, monetary policy and debt. In her role as FDMD, the #2 official of the IMF, she oversaw the work of senior staff, represented the Fund at multilateral fora such as G7 and G20, maintained high-level contacts with member governments and Board members, the media, and other institutions, led the Fund’s work on surveillance and oversaw large IMF programs, such as those for Argentina and Ukraine.

As Chief Economist, she helmed thirteen releases of the World Economic Outlook, including forecasts of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global economy. She co-authored the “Pandemic Paper” on how to end the COVID-19 pandemic that set globally endorsed targets for vaccinating the world and led to the creation of the Multilateral Task Force made up of the leadership of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and WHO to help end the pandemic and the establishment of a working group with vaccine manufacturers to identify trade barriers, supply bottlenecks, and accelerate delivery of vaccines to low- and lower-middle income countries. She also worked with other Fund departments to connect with policy makers, academics, and other stakeholders on a new analytical approach to help countries respond to international capital flows via the Integrated Policy Framework.

Ms. Gopinath is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, and a member of the Group of Thirty. She has previously served as the co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She is the co-editor of the current Handbook of International Economics and was earlier the co-editor of the American Economic Review and managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies.

Ms. Gopinath has received numerous awards and commendations. In 2021, Financial Times named her among the ‘25 most influential women of the year’, the International Economic Association named her the Schumpeter-Haberler Distinguished Fellow, the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association recognized her with the John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and the Carnegie Corporation named her among ‘Great (American) Immigrants’. She was named among the Bloomberg ‘50 people who defined 2019’, a ‘Top Global Thinker’ by Foreign Policy, and among the ‘Women who Broke Major Barriers to Become Firsts’ by Time Magazine.

Ms. Gopinath is the recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honor conferred on overseas Indians by the Government of India, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. The IMF named her one of the ‘top 25 economists under 45’ in 2014, she was chosen as one of the ‘25 Indians to Watch’ by the Financial Times in 2012, and she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011.

Ms. Gopinath received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2001, after earning a B.A. from Lady Shri Ram College and M.A. degrees from Delhi School of Economics and the University of Washington.