Nancy Birdsall

Who is Nancy Birdsall?

Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. She co-founded CGD in November 2001 with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott, Jr. Prior to becoming the President of CGD, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, At the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, Birdsall spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as director of the Policy Research Department.

Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and over 100 articles in scholarly journals and monographs, published in English and Spanish. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals. She has also been quoted in "The Onion."