Shekhar Shah is the Vice Chair of the Academic Advisory Council at the Indian School of Public Policy, and Advisory Board member at the Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University. He is the former Director-General of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India’s oldest and largest, independent, economic think tank. Between 2011 and 2021, he led NCAER in its institutional transformation, the deepening of its research, survey and outreach capacities, the diversification of its funding, and the development of its new, world-class campus.
As a development economist with more than four decades of global experience, Shekhar has worked on policies and programs related to macro, trade, fiscal, labor markets, and service delivery in health and education. He remains particularly interested in what keeps some people and countries poor: the failure of markets, of governments and politics, and of development aid.
Before joining NCAER, Shekhar spent over two decades at the World Bank, including as the Bank’s Deputy Research Administrator, Lead Economist for Bangladesh, Sector Manager for Governance and Public Sector Management for Europe and Central Asia, and the Regional Economic Adviser for South Asia. He was a principal author of the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People. He designed and established the Bank's Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics starting in 1989. He was earlier the Ford Foundation’s South Asia Program Officer for Economics based in New Delhi, and before that worked in Washington D.C. consulting for the US Federal Reserve Board and other financial regulators. Shekhar holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Economics from St Stephens College, Delhi University.
