Punam Chuhan-Pole is Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist of the Africa Region at the World Bank. 

She is currently leading a study documenting and analyzing recent development progress in Africa—Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent.  Her recent work includes development of a new semi-annual publication—Africa’s Pulse—which presents recent economic trends and prospects for the region’s economies and analysis of issues shaping Africa’s future. 

Punam has also been a member of the core team producing the Global Monitoring Report, a joint World Bank-IMF annual publication. 

Her area of expertise includes aid and development, improving the quality and effectiveness of aid, links between donor allocations and recipient policies, and the changing aid landscape and the role of new public and private development players.  She has also worked extensively on monitoring and assessing vulnerability of developing countries to external shocks, analyzing the determinants of private capital flows, and evaluating the debt defaults of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Punam led the Bank’s participation in the Inter-Agency Task Force on Finance Statistics and has collaborated closely with staff from the BIS, ECB, IMF, and OECD in establishing new international standards on the measurement and reporting of debt and other financial obligations and in preparing the new Debt Guide.