PEOPLE

Robin Burgess

Director/Professor of Economics
IGC Hub/London School of Economics and Political Science
Email address: 
r.burgess@lse.ac.uk
Phone number: 
+44 20 7955 6676

Robin Burgess is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Director of the IGC and Director of the Economic Organisation and Public Policy Programme at the London Shool of Economics.

He was brought up in Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, the US, the Philippines and Italy where his father worked as a doctor and his mother as a child nutritionist. He received a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from Edinburgh University, a M.Sc. in Economics from the LSE and a D.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University.

His areas of research interest include development economics, public economics, political economy, labor economics and environmental economics. He has published on a variety of topics – natural disasters, mass media, rural banks, land reform, labor regulation, industrial policy, taxation, poverty and growth. He has been a Visiting Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ecole Polytechnique, University College London and the University of California at Berkeley. He is Co-Director of the Development Economics Program at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), a Fellow of the European Development Research Development Network (EUDN), a member of the Institute for Policy Dialogue (IPR), an Associate Editor of the Economic Journal and is the founder and director of the Microeconomics of Growth Research Network.

Before joining academia he served as a consultant economist with the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Government of India.

Related Content

WORKING PAPER

Can basic entrepreneurship transform the economic lives of the poor?

The world’s poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomised control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of agricultural labour and into running small businesses. This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings.

POLICY BRIEF

Basic Entrepreneurship: A Big New Idea in Development

A new way of helping the world’s poorest people is proving to be a staggering success and is spreading throughout the developing world. Recent research co-authored by Robin Burgess of the LSE and Director of the IGC finds that the scheme led to an increase in people’s incomes of around 35% after two years. For anyone this would be a big jump, but these are women who had previously struggled to feed themselves and their families.