The Inter-American Development Bank today announced that Santiago Levy Algazi, an architect of Mexico's successful social program that invests in the education, health and nutrition of extremely poor families, is its new chief economist and general manager of its Research Department.
Levy, who has distinguished himself as a public official, academic researcher and university professor, designed the conditional cash transfer program known as Oportunidades, which assists more than 5 million of Mexico’s poorest households and has inspired other countries interested in finding effective strategies to fight poverty.
Before coming to the IDB Levy was a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC; general director of the Mexican Social Security Institute, deputy minister at the Finance Ministry, president of the Federal Competition Commission and director of the Economic Deregulation Program at the Trade Ministry.
As an international consultant, in recent years Levy advised the United Nations Development Program on the UN Millennium Development Goals and the governments of Brazil, Egypt and Mauritius on poverty reduction policies.
Levy was a tenured professor and director of the Institute for Economic Development at Boston University, where he received undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees in economics. He conducted postdoctoral research at Cambridge University and taught at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
Among his most recently published works are two books on the Mexican conditional cash transfers program, Progress Against Poverty (Brookings Institution Press, 2006) and Sin Herencia de Pobreza (with Evelyne Rodriguez, a copublication IDB/Editorial Planeta, 2005).
The IDB’s previous chief economists were Guillermo Calvo, currently director of Columbia University’s program of economic policy management, and Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard University’s Center for International Development.