IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath "The meeting comes days after the IMF announced that she is being promoted as its First Deputy Managing Director."

 Gita Gopinath is the Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In that role, she is the Economic Counsellor of the Fund, and Director of its Research Department. She is on leave of public service from Harvard University’s Economics department where she is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics.

Ms. Gopinath’s research, which focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics, has been published in many top economics journals. She has authored numerous research articles on exchange rates, trade and investment, international financial crises, monetary policy, debt, and emerging market crises. She is the co-editor of the current Handbook of International Economics and was earlier the co-editor of the American Economic Review and managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies. She had also previously served as the co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Ms. Gopinath is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, and a member of the Group of Thirty. Earlier she was a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Before joining the faculty of Harvard’s economics department in 2005, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Ms. Gopinath was born in India and is a U.S. national and an overseas citizen of India. She has received numerous awards and commendations. In 2021, Financial Times named her among the ‘25 most influential women of the year’, the International Economic Association named her the Schumpeter-Haberler Distinguished Fellow, the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association recognized her with the John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and the Carnegie Corporation named her among ‘Great (American) Immigrants’. She was named among the Bloomberg ‘50 people who defined 2019’, a ‘Top Global Thinker’ by Foreign Policy, and among the ‘Women who Broke Major Barriers to Become Firsts’ by Time Magazine.

Indian-American Gita Gopinath, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday.

The meeting comes days after the IMF announced that she is being promoted as its First Deputy Managing Director.

She would replace Geoffrey Okamoto who plans to leave the Fund early next year. Gopinath, who was scheduled to return to her academic position at Harvard University in January 2022, has served as the IMF's chief economist for three years.

Ms. Gopinath is the recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honor conferred on overseas Indians by the Government of India, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. The IMF named her one of the ‘top 25 economists under 45’ in 2014, she was chosen as one of the ‘25 Indians to Watch’ by the Financial Times in 2012, and she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011.

Ms. Gopinath received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2001, after earning a B.A. from Lady Shri Ram College and M.A. degrees from Delhi School of Economics and the University of Washington.

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