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Ganeshan Wignaraja

Visiting Senior Fellow

Portrait of Ganeshan Wignaraja

Concurrent with his affiliation at ODI, he is the Advisor to the President of Sri Lanka on Strategic Trade Policy. He is also the Professorial Fellow in Economics and Trade at Gateway House: The Indian Council on Global Relations in Mumbai and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies of the National University of Singapore.

In a career spanning over the last thirty years, Wignaraja has held senior roles in international organizations (including the Director of Research at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Institute in Tokyo, Advisor to the Chief Economist of the ADB in Manila, Chief Programme Officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, and a Visiting Scholar at the IMF in Washington DC), government (including Executive Director of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry think tank and a Member of the Monetary Policy Consultative Committee of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka) and the private sector (including Global Head of Trade and Competitiveness at Maxwell Stamp PLC in London). He has also worked for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Oxford University.

Wignaraja led the Asian Development Bank’s influential studies on Asia’s free trade agreements and business responses in 2010 and costs and benefits of Asian infrastructure connectivity in 2016. He also co-wrote the ODI study on development prospects and challenges for Asian middle-income countries in 2018 and the Chatham House study on China’s Belt and Road in Sri Lanka in 2020. He has published extensively on key policy issues facing developing countries – global supply chain disruptions; unlocking infrastructure financing; sovereign debt vulnerabilities; and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.

Wignaraja holds a DPhil in Economics from Oxford University.