Vijayendra (Biju) Rao, a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, works at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and political science to study the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries. He leads the , an inter-disciplinary effort to improve the conversation between citizens and governments.
His , published in the American Economic Review, the American Political Science Review, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Development Economics, World Development and other places has spanned a variety of subjects. In his early work he pioneered empirical research in Economics on , and . His 2004 edited book with Mike Walton, , was an effort to instigate a conversation between anthropologists and economists to open up (then) new questions at the intersection of culture and development including the role of aspirations, inequality traps, and cultural heritage. He is a to better understand and diagnose issues in development, and in using that underlie outcomes estimated in impact evaluations. His recent work has focused on participatory approaches to development, , and voice and agency among the poor. He has been experimenting with the use of in Indian village meetings, and in employing natural experiments to tease out causal links with large-N qualitative data. He and Ghazala Mansuri co-authored Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? which the Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson has described as ¡°one of the most important books in development in recent years.¡± His most recent book, co-authored with Paromita Sanyal, is (Cambridge University Press).
Dr. Rao obtained a BA in Economics from St. Xavier¡¯s College, Bombay University, a PhD in Economics from the , was a Hewlett post-doctoral fellow at the Economics Research Center and an Associate of the at the University of Chicago, and has been a Mellon Fellow at Population Studies Centers at the University of Michigan and Brown University. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at before joining the World Bank¡¯s research department in 1999.
He is the Chair of the Advisory Committee of the interdisciplinary program on , at the , and currently serves on the editorial boards of , and
