Martin Ravallion

Who is Martin Ravallion?

Martin Ravallion, born 1952, is an Australian economist. As of 2013 he was the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Professor of Economics at Georgetown University, and previously had been director of the research department at the World Bank. He has researched extensively on poverty in developing countries and on policies for fighting poverty. In 1990 he proposed what has come to be known as the “$1 a day” poverty line, and since then he and his colleagues at the Bank monitored progress against global poverty by this and other measures. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies and written three books and 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. He is a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Non-Resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development, and President-elect of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality. In 2011 he received the John Kenneth Galbraith Award from the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.