Rhodes Forum

Graciana Del Castillo (USA), Adjunct Professor School of international and public affairs, Senior Research Scholar, Columbia University

Graciana del Castillo is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University and a founding partner of MAG (Macroeconomic Advisory Group). She is a Member of the Afghanistan Study Group at the New America Foundation, the Advisory Board of the Calvo Fund, the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, and the WATU Foundation for Indigenous Populations in Madrid. She is also an Associated Fellow of the International Center for Globalization and Development in Santiago de Chile.

Dr. del Castillo was the first senior economist in the Cabinet of the UN Secretary-General in the early 1990’s, involved in ongoing peace operations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. She continued work on countries at war and post-conflict at the IMF (1996-98), where she also taught financial programming to government officials and directors of central banks in countries from Russia to Ecuador. She was Special Economic Advisor to Bernard Kouchner, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Kosovo, after the 1999 war. In 2000, she was invited by the IMF and the World Bank to moderate a major donor’s meeting on Timor-Leste in Prague. She has been a director at Standard & Poor’s (2000-02) and the Centennial Group (2006-10), a visiting scholar at the OECD Development Center (2002) in Paris, a senior consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank (2003-07), and a participant in Asian Development Bank and Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) projects in Asia and Latin America (2007-08).

One of the highlights of her professional career involved the negotiation and drafting of a detailed proposal on the arms-for-land program in El Salvador that the UN Secretary-General offered as a solution, after the FMLN had stopped demobilization. In his book, Peacemonger, Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs, Marrack Goulding noted that this proposal was instrumental in bringing the peace process back on track and that “Most of the credit for this success was due to del Castillo who drafted a professional, coherent, and well-balanced program of action.” She was also involved in the design of policies for jumpstarting the Kosovo economy after production and the banking system had collapsed following the war and NATO bombardment in 1999. Other noteworthy experiences involved negotiating \'investment grade\' to lower borrowing costs for Mexico and establishing the first sovereign rating for Guatemala at Standard & Poor’s so that the country could tap the capital markets for the first time. She also advised governments in Asia and Latin America on how to create a better framework to promote foreign direct investment, to deal with debt and contingent liabilities, to improve the business climate, particularly for micro and small enterprises, and on other issues relating to investment, growth, employment, and financing so that countries can improve the living standard and the economic prospects of their populations.

With a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University (1986), she was Adjunct/Visiting Professor there in 1990-2007 and was Associate Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society (2008-09). Oxford University Press published her book on Rebuilding War-Torn States: The Challenge of Post-Conflict Reconstruction in late 2008. Her articles have appeared in top economic and political journals and over 60 newspapers worldwide.