Steven Radelet


Steven Radelet is an American economist working within the field of International Development. He holds the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development and is also the Director of the Global Human Development Program at Georgetown University, a program of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia called Radelet "one of the leading development thinkers and practitioners in the world today." He has worked as an adviser to governments, in academia at Georgetown and Harvard University, and in senior-level U.S. government positions at USAID, the State Department and the Treasury. In addition to his experience as a practitioner, he has published and contributed to a number of books and articles in academic journals and fora.

Professional background

Dr. Radelet earned his B.S. in Mathematics from Central Michigan University in 1979. He then earned his M.P.P. in 1986 from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government before going on to finish his Ph.D in Public Policy in 1990. He wrote his dissertation, titled Economic Recovery in The Gambia: The Anatomy of an Economic Reform Program, on the country's response to its economic crisis.

Career

Radelet began his career in international development in 1981 when he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa with his wife, Carrie Hessler-Radelet. After returning to the US and completing his doctorate, he stayed at Harvard University for 12 years to serve in a number of roles, including as the Director of the Macroeconomics Program at the Harvard Institute for International Development and as a Lecturer in the Economics Department and the Kennedy School of Government. During his tenure with HIID, Radelet spent four years as resident adviser to the Ministry of Finance in Jakarta, Indonesia, and two years with the Ministry of Finance and Trade in The Gambia.
Radelet joined the Georgetown faculty in 2012 after serving as the Chief Economist of the United States Agency for International Development where he worked with former Administrator Rajiv Shah on the launch of Feed the Future, an initiative focusing on agricultural production and farming communities. He previously served as Senior Adviser for Development to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development.
Radelet has served as an economic adviser to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia since 2005, and worked in a similar role for the Government of Malawi from 2012-14. He also acts as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Publications

He has contributed to debates and discussions at the Cato Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations and other research institutions in addition to participating in a variety of speaking engagements, including a TedX talk at Georgetown University.
In a review of his newest book, Bono, lead singer of U2 and co-founder of The ONE Campaign and, stated: "With his typical care and detail, Steve describes humanity’s greatest hits over the last twenty years".

Selected works

He and his co-authors won the Royal Economic Society Prize, an annual award bestowed upon the author of the best paper published in the Economic Journal, in 2012 for their article Counting Chickens When They Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth.