Contributor : Profile

Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

In addition he works as a consultant to Google.org, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Global Development, and is a senior fellow of BREAD. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in Economics and in 1988 from MIT with a Ph.D. in Economics.

After finishing at MIT Lant joined the World Bank, where he held a number of positions in the Bank's research complex between 1988 and 1998, including as an adviser to Lawrence Summers when he was Vice President 1991-1993. From 1998 to 2000 he worked in Indonesia. From 2000 to 2004 Lant was on leave from the World Bank as a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2004 he returned to the World Bank and moved to India where he worked until May 2007.

He has been part of the team producing many World Bank reports, including: World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for Development; Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why (1998); Better Health Systems for India's Poor: Findings, Analysis, and Options (2003); World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for the Poor; Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reforms (2005).

In addition he has authored (alone or with one of his 22 co-authors) over 50 papers published in refereed journals, chapters in books, or as articles, as least some of which are sometimes cited. In addition to economics journals his work has appeared in specialised journals in demography, education, and health. In 2006 he published his first solo authored book Let Their People Come, and in 2013 his second, The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning.