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The First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Gita Gopinath has made it as the first woman to be featured on the 'wall of former chief economists' of the IMF, making it a proud moment in the history of IMF. This makes her only the second Indian to achieve this feat as the first Indian to achieve the honour was none other than Raghuram Rajan as IMF's Chief Economist and Director of Research between the years 2003 and 2006.
Gita Gopinath took to Twitter to display the wall of former chief economists with her photograph with a caption, "breaking the trend I joined the wall of former Chief Economists of the IMF."
Gita Gopinath's journey with the IMF began when she was appointed as its Chief Economist in October 2018. She was later promoted as the IMF's First Deputy Managing Director in December 2021. Notably, Gopinath had served as the first female chief economist of the Washington-based global lender for- the last three years. IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said in a statement last year that under Gopinath’s leadership, IMF’s research department made contributions, including in multilateral surveillance through the World Economic Outlook, developing a new analytical approach to help nations respond to international capital flows and her recent work on a plan to end the covid crisis by setting targets to vaccinate the world at a feasible cost.
Gita Gopinath was a visiting scholar at both the IMF and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. India-born Gopinath received her PhD in economics from Princeton University in 2001 after earning a BA from the University of Delhi and MA from the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Washington. She joined the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2001 as an assistant professor before moving to Harvard in 2005.