Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer Appointed World Bank Chief Economist

Key facts

• The World Bank named Nobel laureate and University of Chicago professor Michael Kremer as its next chief economist, succeeding Indermit Gill, who retired last month; he will take charge on October 1.
• Kremer, 61, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 jointly with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
• He is the first economist to join the World Bank as chief economist with a Nobel Prize already in hand; former chief economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Romer received the Nobel after their tenures.
• Born on November 12, 1964, in New York, Kremer earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1992, worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became a Harvard professor in 1999, and currently directs the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago.
• Kremer helped design an Advance Market Commitment for a pneumococcal vaccine, resulting in three approved vaccines rolled out across 60 countries with an estimated 700,000 lives saved.
• His deworming research informed large-scale programmes, with governments in Africa and South Asia providing about 2 billion treatments since 2014, according to the World Bank.
• Kremer co-founded the Development Innovation Ventures fund administered by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2010; the fund was later shut down after Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025.
• World Bank President Ajay Banga announced the appointment, saying Kremer had spent his career identifying what works in development and proving it at scale.