Who is Gita Gopinath? Indian-origin economist who stepped down as IMF's first deputy managing director
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Who is Gita Gopinath? Indian-origin economist who stepped down as IMF's first deputy managing director")
File photo of Gita Gopinath. Photograph: (X/@GitaGopinath)
Gita Gopinath thanked the Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, and her predecessor, Christine Lagarde, for appointing her as chief economist and called her service in the IMF a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Indian-origin economist Gita Gopinath, serving as the first deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), announced she will step down from her position at the end of August and will return to her academic career as a professor of economics at Harvard University, the IMF said on Monday.
Calling her service in the IMF a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Gopinath thanked the Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, and her predecessor, Christine Lagarde, for appointing her as chief economist. "I now return to my roots in academia to continue pushing the research frontier in international finance and macroeconomics," she said.
Who is Gita Gopinath?
Born on December 8, 1971, in Kolkata, India, Gita Gopinath belongs to a Malayali Hindu Nair family from Kannur, Kerala. Gita is also related to the late communist party politician A. K. Gopalan. Gopinath's schooling was accomplished at Nirmala Convent School in Mysuru, and she later earned her bachelor's degree in economics from Lady Shri Ram College in 1992, followed by an MA from the Delhi School of Economics in 1994. Later, she received her second MA degree from the University of Washington in 1996 and completed her PhD degree at Princeton in 2001.
After her PhD in 2001, Gita was employed as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. After 4 years, in 2005, she moved to the economics department of Harvard University, where she later became the John Zwanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics, as per the report in NDTV.
In October 2018, Gopinath made history as the first woman to be appointed as Chief Economist of the IMF. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-authored "Pandemic Paper," which led to the creation of a Multilateral Task Force in collaboration with the World Bank, WTO, and WHO.
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By June 2021, she became a member of the World Bank-IMF High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery effort. By December of the same year, she was promoted to First Deputy Managing Director. She has also served as the co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics Programme at NBER and gave expert guidance to the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York.
Back in India, Gopinath held an honorary post as an economic advisor to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in 2016. A naturalised American citizen with Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) status, Gopinath is married to Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal, a classmate from the Delhi School of Economics, with whom she has a son who was born in 2002 as ‘Rohil.’
