Robin Burgess is Professor of Economics, Founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, and Director of the Economic Organisation and Public Policy Programme all at the London School of Economics.

He was brought up in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, the US, the Philippines and Italy where his father worked as a doctor and his mother as a child nutritionist. He received a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from Edinburgh University, a M.Sc. in Economics from the LSE and a PhD in Economics from Oxford University.

His areas of research interest include development economics, public economics, political economy, labor economics and environmental economics. He has published on a variety of topics – natural disasters, mass media, rural banks, land reform, labor regulation, industrial policy, taxation, poverty and growth. He has been a Visiting Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ecole Polytechnique, University College London and the University of California at Berkeley. He is Program Director of the Development Economics Program at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Member of the Board of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), a member of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Fellow of the European Development Research Development Network (EUDN), a member of the Institute for Policy Dialogue (IPR), an Associate Editor of the Economic Journal and is the Founder and Director of the Microeconomics of Growth Research Network.

Before joining academia he served as a consultant economist with the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Government of India. He lives in North London with his wife Bronwen Burgess and daughters Isla Macbeth Burgess and Romilly Belle Burgess.