Raj M. Desai is a nonresident senior fellow in Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution, and Associate Professor of International Development in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

For the past eight years, Desai has taught courses on comparative and international political economy at Georgetown University. His work focuses on problems of economic reform, poverty, and international development.

Previously, Desai was a member of the core team for the World Bank's World Development Report team. He has also served as a consultant to the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and other international organizations. From 1996 to 1999, he was as a private sector development specialist at the World Bank, where he worked on the privatization and restructuring of public enterprises in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and on the recovery of financial systems following economic crises in East Asia and Latin America. He has also taught at Harvard University and Charles University in Prague.

In addition to being a co-author of A Better Investment Climate for Everyone (World Development Report 2005), he is co-editor of Can Russian Compete? and of Between State and Market: Mass Privatization in Transition Economies (1997). He as also authored articles on economic reform, entrepreneurship, and poverty alleviation in The American Political Science Review, Economics and Politics, Journal of Comparative Economics, IMF Staff Papers, Economics of Transition, The World Bank Research Observer, and The European Journal of Political Economy, The National Interest, and Survival.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and from the National Science Foundation. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, and his B.A. from the University of California, Irvine.

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