Dr. Shekhar Shah is the Vice Chair of the Academic Advisory Council and a member of the Board of Directors at the Indian School of Public Policy, New Delhi, and a Non-resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C. With nearly five decades of global experience as a development economist, he has worked on policies related to macroeconomics, trade, fiscal management, labor markets, and service delivery in health and education. As the Director-General of NCAER, India’s oldest and largest independent economic research think tank, he led its institutional transformation and research expansion over ten years, including initiating new research and data collection on land issues. Prior to that, he held key research and operational positions over nearly three decades at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and at the Ford Foundation. Dr. Shah remains keenly interested in policy solutions and evidence on what keeps some people and countries poor, the failure of markets, governments, politics, and development aid, climate change, and the promise and perils of new digital technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University and a B.A. in Economics from Delhi University’s St. Stephen’s College.