Roberta V. Gatti

Chief Economist, Middle East and North Africa, The World Bank

Roberta Gatti is the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the World Bank, where she oversees the analytical agenda of the region and the publication of the semi-annual MENA Economic Updates. She is the founder of the MENA Central Banks Regional Research Network. In her prior capacity as Chief Economist for the Human Development Practice Group, Roberta co-led the conceptualization and launch of the World Bank Human Capital Index and the scale up of the Service Delivery Indicators data initiative. Roberta joined the World Bank as a Young Professional in the Macro unit of the Development Research Group and she has since led and overseen both operational and analytical work in her roles of Manager and of Global Lead for Labor Policies. Roberta’s research, spanning a broad set of topics such as growth, firm productivity, the economics of corruption, gender equity, and labor markets, has been published in lead field journals such as the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and the Journal of Development Economics. She is also the lead author of a number of flagship reports, including Jobs for Shared Prosperity: Time for Action in the Middle East and North Africa; Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in Middle East and North Africa; The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19; and Service Delivery in Education and Health across Africa. Roberta has taught courses at the undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. Level at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. She is a frequent lecturer on development economics, most recently at Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and Cornell University. Roberta holds a B.A. from Università Bocconi and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.