Maurizio Bussolo

I’m a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Chief Economist Office for South Asia, where I steer analytical work at the intersection of growth, inequality, and gender. My research probes how macro-level policies and structural transformations translate into micro-level welfare outcomes, with a particular focus on inequality of opportunity, the formation and consequences of social norms, and women’s economic empowerment in South Asia and beyond. Methodologically, I combine computable general-equilibrium and macro-micro linking models with household-survey microsimulations, field experiments, and novel social-norm measurement tools to trace the distributional impact of trade, technological change, and demographic shifts.

Over more than two decades at the World Bank, I have led crisis-response operations in Latin America and authored flagship regional reports such as Hidden Potential: Rethinking Informality in South Asia and Toward a New Social Contract: Taking on Distributional Tensions in Europe and Central Asia, as well as methodological volumes such as The impact of macro-economic policies on poverty and income distribution – Macro-Micro Evaluation Techniques and Tools. I previously served in the Chief Economist Office for Europe & Central Asia and in the Development Economics Prospects Group, and earlier in my career I worked at the OECD, the Overseas Development Institute, and Fedesarrollo in Colombia. I have published widely in peer-reviewed journals—including the Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Inequality, Review of Income and Wealth, and Journal of Development Economics—on topics ranging from global middle-class emergence to vertical and horizontal redistribution. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Warwick.