World Bank names Nobel economist Michael Kremer chief economist

The World Bank Group on 16 September named Michael Kremer, the University of Chicago professor who shared the 2019 Nobel in economic sciences, as chief economist and senior vice president for development economics. He starts on 1 October, days before the Bank and the IMF hold their annual meetings in Bangkok. He succeeds Indermit Gill, who retired in August. Reuters noted that Kremer is the first person to take the job already holding a Nobel. Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Romer received theirs after they had left the post.

Kremer is 61. He took his PhD at Harvard, taught there as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies, and now directs the Development Innovation Lab at Chicago. The 2019 prize, shared with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, cited their use of randomised trials to test anti-poverty programmes. That method is now ordinary in development shops. Kremer’s own file is more specific than the prize citation.

With Rachel Glennerster he designed Advance Market Commitments for vaccines and helped launch a $1.5 billion pneumococcal AMC with Gavi and the World Bank. Doses bought under that contract reached 60 developing countries. His deworming trials informed government programmes in Africa and South Asia that have delivered about two billion treatments to children since 2014. Work on digital agriculture and weather forecasts, some of it using machine-learning models, fed government schemes that the Bank says reach more than 50 million people. He co-founded Precision Development, which sends agronomic advice to smallholders by phone, and USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, which has put money into more than 300 projects that the agency says have reached more than 200 million people.

Ajay Banga, the Bank president, tied the hire to a labour problem. “He joins us at a time when the world needs bold solutions to its most urgent development challenges, including creating jobs that meet the aspirations of more than 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the coming decade,” Banga said. Official development assistance fell 23 percent in 2025, the sharpest drop on record, with the United States accounting for most of the cut. The Bank wants research that can be sold to finance ministries and to private lenders, not only to journals.

Kremer’s own statement stayed inside that brief. He said the Bank has the staff to test ideas and the balance sheet to take them to scale. He listed three tasks: jobs at volume, private capital for development, and basic services. He also pointed to new tools, including digital systems, as a way to raise growth if governments can measure what they do. That is the Kremer pitch in one paragraph. It is also a warning. A chief economist who made his name on field trials will be judged on whether the Bank’s country programmes start to look more like those trials and less like lending volume.

The Development Economics vice presidency runs the Bank’s flagship reports, the data platforms that finance ministers actually open, and the research department that feeds IDA replenishment arguments. Gill spent his term arguing that middle-income countries need a different product from low-income ones. Kremer arrives with a toolkit built in Kenya, India and elsewhere on worms, vaccines and farm messages. Translating that into the Bank’s $100 billion-plus annual commitment machine is the job.

He is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He co-founded BREAD, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and is an NBER research associate. Those affiliations will matter less in Bangkok than whether he can tell a finance minister, in one page, which education or health outlay has a measured return this decade.

The appointment does not change the Bank’s capital or its shareholders. It changes the person who sets the research agenda at a moment when aid is shrinking and the youth bulge Banga cited is not. Kremer has six weeks before the meetings. The first test is whether the analytical papers that come out of those meetings sound like his lab or like the last cycle.