Martin Ravallion held the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University. Prior to taking up the Non-Resident Fellow position in December 2012 he had been Director of the World Bank’s research department, the Development Research Group, since 2007. He joined the Bank’s staff as an economist in 1988 and worked in virtually all sectors and regions over the subsequent 24 years.
Martin’s main research interests concerned poverty and policies for fighting it. In 1990 he proposed what has come to be known as the “$1 a day” poverty line. He and his colleagues at the Bank monitored progress against global poverty by this and other measures. He advised numerous governments and international agencies on poverty and policies for fighting it and written extensively on this and other subjects in economics, including three books and 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. He served on the Editorial Boards of ten economics journals, a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, a Founding Council Member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, USA. Amongst various prizes and awards, in 2012 he was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
You can read Martin's remembrance blog post here.
