• October 31, 2014

Special economic adviser with fresh ideas in development economics

Franck Wiebe, former Chief Economist of the Millenium Challenge Corporation, has joined Nathan Associates? division of International Development Economics as a special economic adviser.

Mr. Wiebe will work on a range of technical and strategic assignments related to the firm?s portfolio of economic policy and regional integration programs, in particular those supporting the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC). He will also contribute to program monitoring and evaluation.

Mr. Wiebe is a professor and faculty director for a new graduate program in international development policy at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Since 2011 he has also been a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD).While with the MCC from 2006 to 2012, he oversaw economic analysis of proposed investment programs, impact evaluation design, and application of the MCC’s ?constraints on growth analysis? that gives focus to MCC proposals. He also represented MCC in the interagency process led by the White House that contributed to the President?s Policy Directive on Development and the subsequent Partnership for Growth efforts. Much of his professional life has focused on understanding the growth and distributional implications of alternative food and agriculture policies and programs.

Mr. Wiebe has more than 10 years of experience in Asia, advising ministries and working at the grassroots level with NGOs and with universities. As chief economist at The Asia Foundation from 1999 to 2006, Mr. Wiebe directed economic reform and development programs that focused on the role of national and subnational impediments to economic growth, with emphasis on identifying regulatory and institutional bottlenecks in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines. and Cambodia. During much of the 1990s, Mr. Wiebe worked with the Harvard Institute for International Development, conducting economic research for Indonesia?s Ministry of Finance on poverty, trade, food, and social welfare policies. During the Asian Financial Crisis, as consultant to the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, he advised on exchange rate movements and inflation, trade matters, and social protection in the economic downturn. In the mid-1990s, he taught for two years at the National University of Singapore while also helping Indonesia?s National Planning Agency formulate a strategy for poverty alleviation. In Bangladesh in 1988, Mr. Wiebe directed a flood-response campaign that procured, packaged, and distributed fast-growing seeds to a million households.

Read some of Mr. Wiebe’s ideas on development:

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