Ganeshan Wignaraja
Director of Research

Brief Biography

Ganeshan Wignaraja joined ADBI in April 2012. His areas of expertise include trade and competitiveness, regional integration, macroeconomic forecasting, technology, foreign aid and poverty reduction. He has published a dozen books and several academic articles in leading journals on these areas. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Asian Economics.

His career over the last two decades spans academia, international organizations, and the private sector. Before joining ADBI, he was Principal Economist at the Asian Development Bank's Office of Regional Economic Integration, where he represented the bank on the WTO Director-General's Advisory Group on Aid for Trade and at ASEAN and APEC senior officials meetings. He was Chief Program Officer at the Commonwealth Secretariat and a manager at a leading UK economics consulting firm. He has also held research positions at Oxford University, the Overseas Development Institute, the OECD, and the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies. He was educated at the London School of Economics (BSc) and Oxford University (D.Phil).

He has managed a wide spectrum of projects, including complex multi-country capacity building projects, country studies, general equilibrium modelling assignments, enterprise surveys and training courses for senior officials. He has managed projects in more than 25 developing and transition countries (including East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean) and collaborated on joint projects with the Governments of the People's Republic of China, Japan, the UK and Singapore. He has worked with the World Bank, DFID, USAID, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Trade Organization, the OECD, UNIDO and the ILO, among others.

Mr. Wignaraja is the author of Economic Reforms, Regionalism and Exports: Comparing China and India (2011) and Trade Liberalization in Sri Lanka: Exports, Technology and Industrial Policy (1998); co-author of Central Asia's Economy: Mapping Future Prospects to 2015 (2006), Small States in Transition: From Vulnerability to Competitiveness (2004), Mauritius: Dynamising Export Competitiveness (1998), Technology and Enterprise Development: Ghana Under Structural Adjustment (1994), The Postwar Evolution of Development Thinking (1991), Participatory Development: Learning From South Asia (1991); editor of Competitiveness Strategy in Developing Countries: A Manual of Policy Analysis (2003); and co-editor of Asia's Free Trade Agreements: How is Business Responding? (2011), Pan-Asian Integration: East Asia-South Asia Economic Relations (2009), and National Strategies for Regional Economic Integration: South and East Asian Case Studies (2009).

ADBI Publications