Professor José Cuesta

Professor José Cuesta is a Professor of Practice in the Department of Economics. 

José Cuesta is a development economist whose work bridges academic research and international policy practice in poverty reduction, inequality, social protection, conflict, social sustainability, gender, and distributive policy. He has advised governments and engaged in policy dialogue in more than 30 countries across various regions. He is currently a Lead Economist at the World Bank and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. He previously served as Chief of Social and Economic Policy at the UNICEF Office of Research in Florence, Senior Research Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, and Economist at the United Nations Development programme in Honduras.

He has held academic appointments at several institutions, including Assistant Professor of Development Economics at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, and visiting professor at Georgetown University, the University of Florence, the University of Málaga, and FLACSO Ecuador. He has published extensively in leading economics and development journals and serves as Editor of the European Journal of Development Research and Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Policy Reform.

Professor Cuesta has made significant contributions to development policy and methodology. He co-directed the World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality and UNICEF’s Report Card 2018: An Unfair Start. His innovative research has expanded fiscal incidence analysis beyond monetary measures through the development of Opportunity Incidence Analysis and the Commitment to Equity for Children framework. He has established the foundations of human rights economics, contributed to develop the first globally comparable measure of social exclusion, and created tools to assess human rights interventions, project scalability, and the economic costs of discrimination, and crime. His current research examines approaches to detect and address gender bias in artificial intelligence. Professor Cuesta, a Spanish national, holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford.

• Poverty
• Inequality
• Social Exclusion
• Discrimination
• Gender
• Social Sustainability
• Conflict