Eric Werker

Eric Werker is a Lead Academic for IGC Sierra Leone.

Eric Werker is the William Saywell Professor at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University. His current research focuses on how governments can best utilize natural resource endowments to achieve broader societal objectives as well as on the energy transition. He has written on private sector development, resource governance, the interface between investments and community, economic diversification, foreign aid, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations, refugees, Covid, and Ebola. Werker teaches about strategy, policy, and global economics to MBAs and executives and has authored numerous case studies on companies and countries around the world.    

Outside of academia, Werker is chief economist and co-founder of Inference Economics, an economics advisory that has worked with a number of Indigenous governments. He is a research affiliate of the International Growth Centre in London and a nonresident senior research fellow at the United Nations University WIDER in Helsinki. He was a member of the Emerging Economy Task Force of the Province of British Columbia, chaired the academic directorate of the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute, served as economic advisor to the President of Liberia, supported host government teams negotiating concession agreements, was a member of the Centre for International Policy Studies study group on Canada’s sustainable development policy, served on the advisory group of the Center for Global Development, consulted to the NGO Conservation International on low-carbon development and to the US Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation on foreign aid projects, and worked with the Refugee Law Project in Uganda.      Werker grew up in Vancouver, earned his A.B. and Ph.D in economics at Harvard, and then spent a decade on the faculty of Harvard Business School before returning to Canada in 2015.