Raj M. Desai

Nonresident Senior Fellow, Wolfensohn Center for Development, Brookings Institution

Raj M. Desai is a visiting fellow at the Wolfensohn Center for Development at the Brookings Institution and Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

His work focuses on problems of economic reform, poverty and international development.

From 1996 to 1999, he was as a private sector development specialist at the World Bank. He worked on the privatization and restructuring of public enterprises in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union— and on the recovery of financial systems following economic crises in Asia and Latin America.

Mr. Desai has taught at Harvard University and Charles University in Prague and is an author of the “World Bank’s World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment Climate for Everyone.”

He has also served as a consultant to the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program and other international organizations.

Mr. Desai is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council and from the National Science Foundation. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University and his B.A. from the University of California, Irvine.