Xavier Sala-i-Martin

On 15 January 2017, Martin was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 14 in the list of 100 Most Influential Economists.

He often collaborates with Catalan media to support the independence of Catalonia from Spain. In 2014 he had a public confrontation with Jose Manuel Durão Barroso, the president of the European Commission, reproaching him the lack of support towards a democratic resolution of the conflict between Spain and Catalonia.

Sala i Martin is, along with Elsa V. Artadi, the author of the Global Competitiveness Index, used since 2004 by the Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum, an index that ranks 142 countries by their level of economic competitiveness.

He was a board member at FC Barcelona and treasurer of the club between 2004 and 2010. He was the president of the club during the electoral process of 2006.

He has been recognized with a Distinguished Teacher in Graduate Economics award three times at Columbia and Yale, with the 2004 King Juan Carlos I Prize (a biannual prize given to the best economist in Spain and Latin America), and the 2006 Lenfest Prize awarded to the best teacher at Columbia University.

Sala i Martin is one of the leading economists in the field of economic growth and is consistently ranked among the most-cited economists in the world for works produced in the 1990s. His works include the topics of economic growth, development in Africa, monetary economics, social security, health and economics, convergence, and classical liberal thinking, with his book Liberal economics for non-economists. The "liberal" in the title should be understood in the classic liberal/libertarian sense.

Born in Cabrera de Mar, Catalonia, Sala i Martin earned a degree in economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1985. He completed his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1990.