Prof Nagesh Kumar is the Director and Chief Executive of the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID). In 2024, he was also nominated by the Government of India as an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Reserve Bank of India for a four-year term. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, and of the Boston University Global Development Policy Centre, Boston, USA.

Prior to taking up the ISID position in May 2021, Dr Kumar served as Director at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission of Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP), holding several senior management roles over 12 years, including as Chief Economist, Director of Macroeconomic Policy and Financing for Development Division and Social Development Division at the UN-ESCAP headquarters in Bangkok and Head of the South and South-West Asia (SSWA) Office located in New Delhi, that he also had the privilege of establishing.

During 2002-2009, Dr Kumar served as the Director-General of the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), a policy think tank of the Government of India (Ministry of External Affairs). He has also served as an Economist at UNU/INTECH (now UNU/MERIT) in Maastricht, the Netherlands during 1993-1998.

Prof Kumar has served on the boards of the EXIM Bank of India, the International Centre for Trade & Sustainable Development (ICTSD), Geneva; the South Asia Centre for Policy Studies (SACEPS), Kathmandu. He has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Economic Research Institute of ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), Commonwealth Secretariat, Commission on Intellectual Property Rights (CIPR), ILO, UNCTAD, UNDP, UN-DESA and UNIDO.

A PhD from the Delhi School of Economics, Dr Kumar is recipient of the Exim Bank’s first International Trade Research Award in 1990, and GDN’s Research Medal awarded by the World Bank and the Japanese Government in Tokyo in 2000, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Delhi School of Economics in 2023.

Dr Kumar has researched extensively on different aspects of economic development, resulting in the publication of 18 books and over 120 peer-reviewed papers, attracting more than 8500 citations at Google Scholar. He also contributes regularly to mainstream newspapers on economic issues.

Find out more about Dr Kumar’s work at www.nageshkumar.com. He tweets at @nageshkum

Website or blog url : https://nageshkumar.com/

Google scholar url: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=huZWi20AAAAJ&hl=en

Reseach Interests : Foreign Direct Investments and International Trade; ​Regional Economic Integration and Industrial Restructuring in Asia; ​South Asian Cooperation; Industrial Policy, Competitiveness and Technology and Innovation Policies; Sustainable Development