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SIPA Faculty
Graciana del Castillo
International Affairs Building, 13th Floor
Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs
Phone: 212-854-3213
gd14@columbia.edu
Biography:
Graciana del Castillo is an expert on countries in crises - both financial and post-conflict. She was the first economist at a senior level in the cabinet of the UN secretary-general in the early 1990's, and the first one to move from the UN Secretariat to the IMF. At the UN, she was responsible for economic reconstruction and was involved in ongoing operations in Central America, Africa, and Asia. Previously, at the Office of the Director-General at the UN, she was actively involved and wrote drafts on the compensation fund and sanctions on Iraq as well as on UN assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries in transition. She continued her work on countries at war and post-conflict transitions at the IMF starting in 1996. She served as the economic policy adviser to the special representative of the secretary-general in Kosovo in 1999, playing an important role in jumpstarting the economy immediately after NATO's bombing. She was invited by the IMF to moderate a major donor conference on Timor-Leste, attended by national authorities, UN officials, and NGO's in Prague during the 2000 IMF and World Bank Annual Meeting.
Dr del Castillo's vision of the role of the UN and the IMF in reconstruction has been deepened by senior positions at Standard & Poor's analyzing country risk, and as a founding partner of the Macroeconomic Advisory Group and the Centennial Group. In the latter two capacities, she has advised governments, international organizations, and the private sector on a wide range of macroeconomic and financial issues. She has also been a senior consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), a visiting scholar at the OECD Development Center where she worked on the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC), and has participated with other consulting firms in several USAID bids for post-conflict economic reconstruction projects, including for economic governance in Afghanistan and Iraq.
She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University (1986), where she has been Adjunct Professor and taught graduate courses in international economics since 1990. She previously taught at New York University, Hunter College, and Hofstra University and has lectured at several universities in Latin America. Dr del Castillo has published extensively on economic and financial issues, including articles in The Journal of International Money and Finance, World Development, Foreign Policy, Global Governance and Der Uberblick.
Her article "The Rules of Post-Conflict Reconstruction," written for Project Syndicate in August 2006, was published in 11 languages in major newspapers including Le Monde, L'Echo (Belgium), I Naftemporiki (Greece), Het Financieele Dagblad (The Netherlands), Respect (Czech Republic), the Japan Times, the Korean Herald, the Indian Times, the Hong Kong Economic Journal, Oriental Daily (Malaysia), Valor (Brasil), El Cronista (Argentina), Vanguardia (El Salvador), Al Eqtisadiah (Saudi Arabia), Webdiary (Australia), Les Echos (Mali), Business Report (South Africa) and in many others in all continents. It was also reproduced in Newsletters of ministries of foreign affairs and defense.