Erik Berglöf

Erik Berglöf became the inaugural Chief Economist of the AIIB on 1 September 2020.

From 2015 to 2020 Erik Berglöf served as the inaugural Director of the London School of Economics' (LSE) Institute of Global Affairs (IGA).

Professor Erik Berglöf became the inaugural Director of the LSE's Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) on 1 February 2015.

From 2006 to 2015 Erik Berglöf was the Chief Economist and special adviser to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the London-based multilateral development bank established in 1991 to lead the economic transformation of the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, including the CIS nations.

Since joining the EBRD in 2006, Berglöf has been credited with creating the "Vienna Initiative", a crisis coordination response involving private banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the European Commission, shown to have mitigated the impact of the global financial crisis in Europe. Its sequel Vienna Initiative 2.0 focuses on managing the impact of the adjustment of the European banking system in the wake of the crisis. As part of the Vienna Initiative 2.0, Berglöf chaired a working group on the banking union with representatives from the international financial institutions, the European Commission, ECB, national regulators and supervisors, and a number of private banks.

In 2000, Berglöf founded the Centre for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) in Moscow, recruiting the first PhDs in economics back to Russia to involve them in the policy process. Recently ranked as the best economics think tank in Russia and 25th in the world, it was part of the New Economic School, the leading graduate program in economics in Russia and the top economics department in the post-Communist world. Currently, Berglöf continue to be in the NES International Advisory Board and serves on NES board of directors. In 2013, Berglöf was awarded the Leontief Medal for his contributions to economic reform in Russia.

Berglöf was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics from 1996 to 2006. During his time at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) he built it into a leading international research institution and helped establish several other think tanks in the emerging world: Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies, Kiev Economics Institute, WISER (now CenEA), and Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE), research-based think tanks in Riga, Kiev, Warsaw (now Szczecin), and Beijing, respectively. In 2005, Berglöf co-founded with the Brookings Institution, The Global Institute, an alliance of research-based think tanks in emerging markets with the aim of strengthening evidence-based policymaking in emerging markets.

Previous academic posts include visiting positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Fulbright Scholar, Harvard Law School (John M. Olin Scholar), and Stanford University where he was also a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. From 1992 to 1996, he was an assistant professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where he was involved with the early building of European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (Ecares), a research-based European think tank in economics.

Since 1989, Erik Berglöf has been married to Annie Maccoby Berglöf. Together they have two daughters, Alexandra and Katarina.

Erik Berglöf (born 1957) is a Swedish economist, currently the Chief Economist of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Beijing-based multilateral development bank established in 2016 with a mission to improve social and economic outcomes in Asia. In March 2019 Erik Berglöf was appointed to the European Council's High Level Group of Wise Persons on the European financial architecture for development where Berglöf and eight other economists will suggest changes to the EU's development finance structure. In 2017–2018 Erik Berglöf served on the secretariat of the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance and on the Governing Board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York.