Caroline Freund

Caroline Freund, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is dean of the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Previously she was director of trade, competition and investment climate at the World Bank. She was also chief economist for the Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank, after working for nearly a decade in the international trade unit of the research department, and has worked in the research departments of the International Monetary Fund and the international finance division of the Federal Reserve Board.

Freund’s research examines international trade, trade policy, and economic growth.  She is the author of Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms.  She has published many articles on the effects of regional trade agreements and edited a volume on The WTO and Reciprocal Preferential Trading Agreements. Her work has appeared in academic journals, including: American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics.  

Freund was a member of the EXIM Bank advisory committee from 2014 to 2016. She is on the scientific committees of CEPII (Institute for Research of the International Economy, Paris) and the Economic Research Forum (Cairo), is a member of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and on the editorial board of the journal Economics and Politics. She received a PhD in economics from Columbia University.