Joseph Francois (economist)

Joseph Francois is a professor of international economics at the University of Bern, where he has taught since 2013. Since 2015, he is also the Managing Director of the World Trade Institute. He is co-director of the European Trade Study Group, which he co-founded in 1999. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and an at-large board member of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP).

He worked as economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1983-87. He then moved to the US International Trade Commission, where from 1987-1993 he started as a research economist and later became Chief of Research (at the age of 28), and then Acting Director of Economics with the USITC. While at the USITC he was co-director of the 1992 USITC assessment of the NAFTA, He was a research economist with the GATT/WTO from 1993-1996, where he coordinated the GATT secretariat economic assessment of the Uruguay Round at the end of the Round. From 1996-2007 he was full Professor of International Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam and research fellow of the Tinbergen Institute. He moved to Austria in 2007 as Professor of Economics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz from 2007-2013. He took a chair in international economics at the University of Bern in 2013, and became managing director of the World Trade Institute in 2015. He consults for governments and international organisations, and periodically advises on the negotiation and impact of trade and investment agreements.

He was born in Washington DC in 1961, and is the oldest of 5 children (Joseph, Marie, Michael, Monica, and Susan). He is the son of Francis Francois and Eileen Schmelzer. He was raised in Bowie, Maryland and attended St. John's College High School. He received his PhD from the University of Maryland in 1988, after receiving a B.A. with distinction in both economics and in history from the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1982 and an M.A. in economics from UVA in 1983.