Raj M. Desai is Professor of International Development at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is a specialist on problems of economic reform, foreign aid, and international development. In addition to coauthoring After the Spring: Economic Transitions in the Arab World (2012) and The World Bank's World Development Report: A Better Investment Climate for Everyone (2005), he coedited Can Russia Compete? (2008) and Between State and Market: Mass Privatization in Transition Economies (1997). He has also authored articles on economic reform, entrepreneurship, and poverty alleviation in the American Political Science Review, Economics and Politics, the Journal of Comparative Economics, IMF Staff Papers, Economics of Transition, the World Bank Research Observer, the International Studies Review, the European Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of International Law and Politics, the National Interest, and Survival. He has received fellowships from the Qatar Foundation and the Swedish Research Council. He has served as occasional consultant to the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank, the UNDP, and other international organizations. He was previously a private sector development specialist at the World Bank, where he worked on the privatization and restructuring of public enterprises in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and on the recovery of financial systems following economic crises in East Asia and Latin America. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, and his B.A. from the University of California, Irvine.
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