Team

Naazneen Barma joined the World Bank in September 2007 as a Young Professional.  She is a Public Sector Specialist in the East Asia and Pacific Region, focusing on governance and civil service reform and political economy analysis.  Her work is currently oriented around implementation of the Bank's new Governance and Anticorruption Strategy in various countries in East Asia.

Naazneen has a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.  Her dissertation was a study of the international role in post-conflict peacebuilding.  She has published articles on state- and democracy-building, international relations among non-Western nations, and innovation in emerging economies, and is the co-editor of a comparative political economy reader.  Naazneen earned her BA (International Relations and Economics) and MA (International Policy Studies) at Stanford University.  She was born and raised in Hong Kong.

David Dollar, a US national, is the World Bank’s Country Director for China and Mongolia in the East Asia and Pacific Region, based in Beijing. 

Before this assignment, Mr. Dollar worked as Director for the development research department of the World Bank, overseeing the Bank’s research on the investment climate and growth.  He co-authored the recent World Bank reports Globalization, Growth, and Poverty and Assessing Aid.  His earlier work focused on aid and growth, and the determinants of the success and failure of reform programs supported by structural adjustment lending.  He has been a key World Bank spokesperson on investment climate, globalization, and the effectiveness of aid.

Mr. Dollar joined the Bank in 1990 as an Economist in the Asia Region.  He worked as the country economist for Vietnam through 1995.  He advised the economic leaders of that country during a period of stabilization and transition to a market economy, and prepared the first World Bank country assistance strategies to support that transition.   

Prior to joining the Bank, Mr. Dollar was on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles; he has published widely in the areas of productivity growth, technology transfer, and development in East Asia.  As a professor, he spent a semester teaching at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He has a PhD in economics from New York University and a B.A. in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.

Flore de Préneuf documents the results of development projects for the World Bank. She went to China recently to look at "green projects" financed by the Bank (www.worldbank.org/china/results). Born in France in 1973, she has worked as a freelance journalist and photographer in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia, the Middle East and Texas. Her personal photo portfolio can be found at www.foto-kino.com.

A U.S. national, Michael Figueroa has worked as an information assistant in the East Asia and Pacific Region for ten years, supporting the region in information management and web development.  Michael earned his Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Government at Georgetown University. He was born and raised in New York City.

Claudia manages the web sites for the Bank's East Asia & Pacific region and has recently added this blog to her brood. She's a native of the beautiful town in the picture  and had to move to Washington, DC, to stay away from the tempting, delicious food of her homeland. Her discovery of East Asian food in recent years has somewhat defeated the original objective, though.
She actually does like DC quite a bit, where she landed after working a few years in the online edition of The Miami Herald.

Nanda Gasparini can talk and write endlessly, so it's no surprise she has a blog (you may need to stop her every now and then). She blames this on being from Venezuela, a country where she says everyone speaks forever (including the president). Living for the past two years in Laos, she's proud to be the only Venezuelan in the country. She's also the World Bank's communications specialist on the Nam Theun 2 project, a hydroelectric dam being built in the country. Prior to arriving in Laos she worked and studied in the U.S. where she was able to pick up an American accent.

Louis Kuijs works since September 2004 as Senior Economist in the World Bank’s China office on macroeconomic issues, conducting macroeconomic analysis and policy dialogue. He is the main author of the Bank’s China Quarterly Update.

Previously, he worked at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, in the European Department and, before that, in the African, and Fiscal Affairs Departments.

Before joining the IMF in 1997, he worked at Oxford Economic Forecasting (Oxford, UK), on macroeconomic modeling and forecasting for industrialized countries and emerging markets.

Mr. Kuijs has also worked at the University of Amsterdam, the Hypo Vereinsbank (Munich, Germany), and for the Economist Intelligence Unit (London, UK).

He received his undergraduate Drs (Economics) degree from the University of Amsterdam and his Ms (Economics) from the London School of Economics.

Joe Leitmann is the World Bank’s environment coordinator for Indonesia, with responsibility for activities related to climate change, natural resource management, pollution, global environmental issues, and environmental safeguards for all sectors.  He is also the Bank’s Disaster Management Coordinator and was the founder/first manager of the $650 million Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias following the tsunami.

With over two decades at the World Bank, Joe has worked on projects, programs and policies related to: post-disaster reconstruction, natural resource management, urban environmental management, urban poverty, and renewable energy.  In addition to short-term assignments in over 50 countries, he has had multi-year field assignments in Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia.  Leitmann began his career in development work as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer.

Leitmann holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California/Berkeley and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.  He is the author of Sustaining Cities: Environmental Planning and Management in Urban Design as well as numerous articles on sustainable development.

Hello, I am Alessandro Magnoli Bocchi.

I like economics, because it provides nice tools to understand what’s happening in the world. For instance, it provides answers to questions like: Why do some countries grow, and others don’t? Why investment pours into some regions, but flees from others? What to do with unemployment? Are prices rising too fast?

I hope you too find these questions important and stimulating - and I look forward to learning, together with you, some of the answers.

My main interests include economic growth, fiscal policy and public finance, social systems analysis, welfare theory, and development.

Currently I work at the World Bank. Previously, I was a Research Associate at Harvard University, and an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Deb works on public sector governance in the East Asia and Pacific region.  Before joining the Bank in fall 2007, she worked on foreign policy in the U.S. Congress, on international health and population issues at several nonprofits, and with troubled teens.  Outside of work, her interests include photography, yoga, and reading fiction. She has a masters in public policy from UCLA and a BA in history from Haverford College, and grew up outside of Boston. In this blog, she tackles public sector governance issues with her colleague Naazneen.

Neeraj Prasad  is the regional Coordinator for the East Asia Carbon Finance portfolio and for Climate Change.   In this assignment, he is responsible for managing and delivering the Bank’s largest Carbon Finance portfolio of CDM projects, and is coordinating a climate change strategy for the region as well. He also continues to manage several environment projects.  Before joining the Bank in 1997, he was a member of the Indian Administrative Service, where his final assignment was in the Indian Ministry of Finance.  He was also seconded to the Indian ED’s office in the IMF from 1993-96.  He has graduate degrees in International Commerce and History.

Federica Ranghieri is an Environmental Specialist in the East Asian and Pacific Region of the World Bank, where she works mainly on climate change policies, economic instruments and a bit on carbon finance. She previously worked for the Carbon Finance Business Unit and contributed to the launch of the Italian Carbon Fund. She is assistant professor at the University of Milan, where used to teach Environmental Policy and Environmental and Social Communication. She worked also for the IADB on stakeholder engagement and corporate social responsibility. And for the private sector, mainly industrial companies, as advisor on environmental accounting, environmental management, climate change measures, Kyoto Protocol and EU Emissions Trading System compliance.  She is a terrible italian cook.

After 7 years in Washington DC, William Rex moved to the World Bank office in Vientiane in 2006 in search of a more intense interaction with government clients and work-life balance. Now that his two young sons have discovered sticky rice and tuk-tuks, there is probably no route back. Since joining the Lao PDR country office, William has been working on capacity and institutional development, governance, aid effectiveness, and a provincial development project in Khammouane. More recently he took over as team leader of the Nam Theun 2 Social and Environment Project. William worked at the University of Cape Town before joining the Bank, and has a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. He has succeeded in finding more intense interaction with government clients.

I work on financial sector development issues in the East Asia & Pacific region for the World Bank.  I have been working on a variety of policy issues, from state-owned banking reform to capital market development across many of the countries in the region, including Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. 

I joined the World Bank in 2002, first joining for a brief period as a consultant with the Financial Sector Development Department in the Europe and Central Asia Region.  I then moved to the World Bank office in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2003 and returned to Washington, DC to take on a more regional portfolio in 2005.  My prior professional experience was with the U.S. Treasury Department on economic and financial sanctions compliance, inspections, and enforcement, and with the U.S. State Department working on foreign policy towards Egypt and North Africa.  I have a graduate degree from the Kennedy School of Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from James Madison University.  To summarize my personal background – I am a native Washingtonian, I live in Arlington, Virginia, I am married with a young daughter, and enjoy any kind of boating.

I'm an odd bird at the World Bank - a wildlife biologist working as the Senior Biodiversity Specialist in our East Asia and Pacific Region. 

If I were fabulously rich I'd probably still be doing something similar to what currently fills most of my time - but without the bureaucracy. My first research was on ducks' sense of smell and my second paper was on the mating display of the Blue Duck.

I moved from waterfowl to primates for my PhD, studying the endangered Kloss gibbon (and the people) on remote Siberut Island, west of Sumatra. That unwittingly set the course for the rest of my life in terms of commitment to our region. That also resulted in my first 'popular' book; for nearly 20 years I had one or more books on the go. With gibbons behind me, I began work as Advisor in the Centre of Environmental Studies at the University of North Sumatra. Seeing the capacity problems facing environmental management in Indonesia, I initiated a series of major ecology books on different areas of Indonesia.

Over the following 12 years - most of those in Indonesia - I wrote three of the volumes (on Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Java and Bali) while employed by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.  During the ten years living in Indonesia I became very involved with freshwater fish and also land snails and ended up writing books on those too.  Meanwhile I consulted for most of the major development agencies on land settlement, indigenous people, forest issues, and biodiversity. I came into the Bank through being a consultant for its independent evaluations arm working in Malaysia and Indonesia on land settlement and transmigration. I joined the Bank in 1995.

My World Bank work is of three types: support to others' projects on habitat policy issues, regional initiatives, and my own conservation projects in Mongolia, China, Indonesia, etc.  The first of these I find very stimulating and satisfying; seeking to find practical and sustainable solutions while allowing the projects to deliver their benefits.  My regional initiatives have sought to fill important gaps and to get Bank imprimatur on important topics and approaches that were not commonly supported.  These have included publications etc on:

• the largely ignored biodiversity of limestone systems especially caves which have had interesting operational implications
• freshwater biodiversity, especially on wild fish which are economically important, especially to poor riparians.   
• local-language fieldguides - we now tally 111 volumes  
• faiths and environment, an initiative which has led to a number of interesting developments

Milan Brahmbhatt is a Lead Economist in the World Bank's East Asia and Pacific Region and editor of the twice yearly East Asia & Pacific Update. Milan is also the Bank's go-to expert on the economic impact of the avian flu. He joined the Bank in 1994 after nine years in the private sector in England and the U.S., as an economic forecaster and consultant for a variety of government and multinational business clients. Milan grew up in Kenya and completed high school and higher education in England. He is a voracious reader, especially of literature, history and philosophy, as well as Internet news sources of all kinds.

Jim Adams is Vice President of the East Asia and Pacific Region, at the World Bank.  In this capacity, he has overall responsibility for World Bank operations in one of the world’s most dynamic regions, covering more than a dozen states ranging from the world’s most populous country --China-- to the smallest and most remote Pacific Islands states.  I

Previously, Jim was Vice President and Head of Network, Operations Policy and Country Services, at the World Bank.  In this capacity, he was responsible for operational policy development, procurement and financial management activities, relations with United Nations and nongovernmental organizations, and support to Regional staff working in all these areas.

Since joining the Bank in 1974, he has held a variety of operational positions in East Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, including as Country Director for Tanzania and Uganda, as Director for Operations Policy, and as a Division Chief of several departments.

Before joining the Bank, Jim worked as a loan officer for Merchants Bank, in Syracuse, NY, and with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Jim studied at Colgate University, and holds an MPA from Princeton University.