About us - Graciana del Castillo
Bio
Graciana del Castillo is an economic expert on countries in crises, including those affected by conflict, natural disasters or financial collapse. Dr. del Castillo's area of expertise is Latin America, but she has broad experience in working with countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. She is a co- founding partner of MAG (Macroeconomic Advisory Group), a member of several advisory boards including the Calvo Fund and BiscayneAmericas Advisers, an Associated Fellow of the International Center for Globalization and Development in Chile, an associated scholar in the Department of Economics of the Catholic University in Uruguay, and a frequent participant in CNN Espanol economic programs for more than a decade.
With a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University she was Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society, where she organized and mobilized resources for major conferences at the top of the global economic and foreign policy agenda. She was also Adjunct/Visiting Professor there for many years. She is currently working with Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University and with M. Ishaq Nadiri at New York University on preparing, discussing with the authorities, and mobilizing resources for an integrated rural development project in Afghanistan to deal with displaced populations, food security, job creation and entrepreneurship. She has developed the concept of "reconstruction zones" and has designed specific proposals for Afghanistan, Haiti, and Liberia, based on different strategies for growth, foreign direct investment, and natural resource exploitation in each of those countries.
At the UN, Dr. del Castillo was the senior economist in the Office of the UN Secretary General. In this capacity she designed the arms-for-land program for El Salvador, which UN Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs at the time, Marrack Goulding (in his book Peacemonger) credited for bringing the peace process back on track. As the Economic Policy Advisor to the special Representative in Kosovo, she played a key role in the design of policies for jumpstarting the Kosovo economy, after the production and the banking and payments systems had collapsed following the war and NATO bombardment in 1999.
While at the UN, she was invited to join the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund in 1995 and later moved to the IMF Institute. She has been a Director at Sovereign Ratings for Latin America at Standard and Poor's, a senior consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, a visiting scholar at the OECD Development Center, an economic advisor to the Mission of Uruguay at the UN, and the Senior Editor of Project Syndicate's Latin American Column. She has lectured widely in the US, Latin America, and Iran.
Dr. del Castillo is the author of Rebuilding War-Torn States (Oxford University Press, 2008). Her academic articles have been published in top economic and political journals and her press articles, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces have appeared in over sixty newspapers worldwide.