Shubham Chaudhuri is the Country Director for Nigeria effective, Oct 01, 2019. He was the World Bank Country Director for Afghanistan from Nov 2016 to July 2019.
He was the South Asia and Indonesia Practice Manager for the World Bank’s Macroeconomics and Fiscal Management Global Practice. He oversaw the macro-fiscal and economic policy-related work of the World Bank in the South Asia region and in Indonesia. From August 2012 till June 2014, he was the Manager of the Washington, DC-based team of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Department for East Asia and the Pacific. Before that, Shubham was the World Bank’s Lead Economist for Indonesia, responsible for leading the overall economic policy dialogue, advisory and development policy lending work of the World Bank in Indonesia. He managed the World Bank’s Jakarta-based economics team, which works closely with partners in government and in the development community, to further Indonesia’s development agenda in several areas, from macroeconomic and fiscal policy, public expenditure analysis and public financial management, to poverty and social protection, trade and investment climate and regional development. Prior to relocating to Jakarta in early 2008 from the World Bank’s Washington, DC headquarters, Shubham was working primarily on China and on East Asia regional policy issues.
Shubham joined the World Bank in 2004 after a decade at Columbia University in New York, where he was an economics professor and Director of the Program in Economic and Political Development. His research, published in journals such as the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, Journal of Public Economics and Journal of International Economics, spanned a number of areas within development economics, from poverty and vulnerability to trade and investment climate to participatory budgeting and fiscal decentralization. Shubham obtained his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, both in economics.