Biography of Gita Gopinath – The Super Economist

The Super Economist

Gita Gopinath is a globally renowned Indian-American economist who has been serving as the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 21^st January 2022. With this prestigious appointment she has been elevated to the Number 2 position in IMF, just after Kristalina Georgieva, the present Managing Director of IMF, in hierarchy. Prior to this appointment, she was the Chief Economist of IMF from 2019-2022.

Gita Gopinath was born on 8^th December 1971, in Kolkata; an important city of India and the capital of the state of West Bengal. She is the younger of two daughters of her parents. The age of Gita Gopinath is 50 years.

Academic Excellence

While exploring about Gita Gopinath we can come to know that she completed her schooling from Nirmala Convent School in Mysore and subsequently graduated from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, under the University of Delhi. She followed her BA in 1992 with an MA in Economics from the globally renowned Delhi School of Economics, which is under the University of Delhi, in 1994.

She also did an MA in Economics from the University of Washington, in 1996. Following that, she earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2001. Her doctoral dissertation is titled ‘Three essays on international capital flows: a search theoretic approach.’ While doing her doctorate, Gita got the Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Research Award.

Many Coveted Positions

The biography of Gita Gopinath should mention that in 2001, her career in economics began when she joined as an Assistant Professor with the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Subsequently, she shifted to the Harvard University’s economics department where she served as the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics from 2005 to 2022.

Gita Gopinath has many feathers in her crowded cap during her super successful journey as an economist. She is one of the leading macro-economists of the present day world. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, and a member of the Group of Thirty. She also had the distinction of being the Co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); of being a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

National Bureau of Economic Research is an American private nonprofit research organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gita Gopinath also served as the Honorary Economic Adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala.

With IMF

In October 2018, she was appointed to the coveted position of the Chief Economist with the International Monetary Fund. She became the first woman to become IMF Chief Economist. As IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath had many significant achievements to her credit.

According to the website of IMF (https://www.imf.org/en/About/senior-officials/Bios/gita-gopinath), she co-authored the “Pandemic Paper” on how to end the COVID-19 pandemic that set globally endorsed targets for vaccinating the world and led to the constitution of the Multilateral Task Force comprising the leadership of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and WHO to help end the pandemic and the establishment of a working group with vaccine manufacturers to identify trade barriers, supply bottlenecks, and accelerate delivery of vaccines to low- and lower-middle income countries.

Gita was honored with Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, which is the highest honor for  overseas Indians given by the Government of India. She also got the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. There is no authentic information in public domain about the net worth of Gita Gopinath.

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