Daniel Kaufman

Daniel Kaufmann is the president of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), a policy institute and non-profit organization operating in more than a dozen countries. An economist, he is a pioneer in the field of governance and anti-corruption worldwide. He has held leadership positions in the field, and has, with his teams, devised innovative approaches to measure and analyze governance. He has deep practical experience in providing high-level policy advice and helping countries in all regions of the world to formulate and carry out governance reforms in areas such as anti-corruption, transparency and natural resources. He has also extensively researched other topics such as economic development, political economy, investment, privatization and urban and labor economics.

Dr. Kaufmann was previously a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he remains a non-resident fellow. Prior to that, he was a director at the World Bank Institute, leading work on governance and anti-corruption. He also held other World Bank senior management positions focused on anti-corruption, finance and regulatory reform, and was lead economist in the research department. He was the bank’s first chief of mission to Ukraine, and worked on capacity building in Latin America and on economic reforms in Africa.

He serves on various advisory boards and has also been a member of the Faculty and Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum (Davos). He is currently a full member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative international board. In major policy circles and the international media, he is associated with such innovations as the Worldwide Governance Indicators, the Resource Governance Index, and the study and analysis of “legal corruption” and state capture.

Dr. Kaufmann, a Chilean, received an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, and a B.A. in economics and statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He enjoys Twitter, opera, soccer and scuba.