Vijayendra Rao

Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. He received his BA from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held academic appointments at Brown, Chicago, Michigan and Williams College. His research—much of it based on fieldwork in Karnataka—integrates economic and anthropological methods to inform poverty-reduction policies in poor countries. He has published several papers in leading journals on the broad themes of decentralised local development, gender inequality, culture and economic behaviour and mixing qualitative and quantitative methods, and co-edited Culture and Public Action.