Lúcio Mauro Vinhas de Souza

Who is Lúcio Mauro Vinhas de Souza?

Lúcio Mauro Vinhas de Souza is a Brazilian-Portuguese economist. His main research areas are in macroeconomics, with a regional concentration in the countries of the Former Soviet Union, but also on the European Union and Latin America. He has a considerable list of publications, including recent reference works about the Russian economy.

Born in Salvador, Bahia, in the Federal Republic of Brazil, in 1966, he has B.A. and M.Sc. degrees in Economics by the Faculdade de Economia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal, and a Ph.D. in Economics by the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Dr. Vinhas de Souza is since 2011 the first Sovereign Chief Economist of Moody's Investors Service, the second largest rating agency in the world. He took this New York-based position during the height of the euro area centered sovereign debt crisis which followed the global economic crisis that started in 2007. His previous experiences in the World Bank and in the European Commission provided valuable insights for the appropriate analysis and understanding of those complex and related processes. Before joining Moody’s, Dr. Vinhas de Souza was a World Bank official based in its Washington, D.C., headquarters, at its Development Prospects Group, where he worked mainly with the euro area crisis, but also with subjects as diverse as the economies of China and Kazakhstan. Before that, he worked between 2005 and 2010 as the official responsible for Russia and Belarus at the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. He developed and managed during this period the highest-level regular framework for macroeconomic policy discussions between the Russian Government and the European Commission, the "Macroeconomic and Financial Policy Dialogue". He was one of the officials responsible for the early negotiation of the new EU-Russia Agreement at the EC. He was also in charge of the integration of Russia into the forecast rounds of DG-ECFIN, the official macroeconomic forecasting agency of the EU.