Introduction

Dr Duvvuri Subbarao served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for five years (2008-13). Prior to that, he was Finance Secretary to the Government of India (2007-08) and Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (2005-07).

Dr Subbarao joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1972, topping the highly competitive civil services entry examination that year. As a career civil servant, he worked in various positions in the state government of Andhra Pradesh and in the federal government of India. Dr Subbarao was a Lead Economist in the World Bank (1999-2004) where his responsibilities involved analysing the public expenditures of developing countries and advising them on fiscal policy issues.

Dr Subbarao studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and later at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He went to Graduate School at Ohio State University in the United States where he received an MS in Economics, and later was a Humphrey Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology studying Public Finance.

Dr Subbarao went in as the RBI’s Governor just a week before the global financial crisis erupted in full in mid-September 2008, and he led the effort to mitigate the impact of the crisis on the Indian economy and to institute economic and financial sector reforms reflecting the lessons of the crisis.

Dr Subbarao has all along maintained a strong commitment to academic pursuits and has written and spoken extensively on issues in macroeconomic management, public finance and financial sector reforms.

After stepping down as Governor of the RBI, Dr Subbarao served as a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and most recently at the University of Pennsylvania.

Areas of Interest and Expertise

• Global Economy
• Indian Economy
• Globalization
• Leadership in Public Policy