Martin Ravallion holds the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University, prior to which he was the Director of the World Bank’s research department. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on poverty and policies for fighting it, and he has written extensively on this and other subjects in economics, including four books and 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. His latest book, The Economics of Poverty, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

He is the President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, USA, and a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development. Amongst various prizes and awards, in 2012 he was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and in 2016 he won a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.