Andres Velasco

Why organisations work with Andrés Velasco

• He ran Chile’s fiscal policy through a commodity supercycle and a global financial crisis – banking windfall reserves against political opposition, then deploying them as counter-cyclical stimulus. This is not a case study; it is his direct personal record, and it has no equivalent among academic economists in the speaker market.
• His analysis of fiscal and monetary decisions is shaped by actual exposure to the institutional mechanics: as a minister, as a member of the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, and as a current member of the Group of Thirty – a grouping that includes sitting and former central bank governors and finance ministers.
• He provides the connection between macro numbers and political reality that standard economic commentary does not: why governments make the fiscal choices they do, what constrains them, and what that means for the investment and operating environments businesses face.
• His Project Syndicate column, running since 2001, covers geopolitics, populism, and macroeconomic policy – offering audiences a track record of real-time, named analysis they can assess rather than a credentials summary alone.
• As Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy, he sits at the centre of the global debate on institutional reform, multilateral development finance, and the future of international economic governance – giving organisations access to the live intellectual agenda, not yesterday’s consensus.

Biography highlights

• Inaugural Dean of the School of Public Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science (since 2018)
• Minister of Finance, Republic of Chile, 2006–2010; named Latin American Finance Minister of the Year by Emerging Markets (Euromoney) and América Economía
• Member of the Group of Thirty – the selective forum of current and former central bank governors, finance ministers, and senior economists
• Member, G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance; World Bank–IMF High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth
• Previously Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development, Harvard Kennedy School; Professor of Professional Practice, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs
• Award for Excellence in Research, Inter-American Development Bank (2006); author of nearly 100 academic articles and several books; regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2001
• CEPR Research Fellow; Co-chair, Global Panel on the Future of the Multilateral Lending Institutions

Biography

Fiscal policy looks technical until a government has to choose between spending a commodity windfall and saving it. When Chile’s copper revenues surged in 2006, Andrés Velasco – then Finance Minister – held the reserves despite intense domestic political pressure, building buffers equivalent to roughly 30% of GDP. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he deployed them. The FT, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg all covered the story. It remains the most concrete demonstration of counter-cyclical fiscal discipline under real political constraints in the modern emerging-market record.

That combination – academic rigour in macroeconomics and direct exposure to the decisions that actually get made – shapes everything Velasco now does at LSE, where he is the inaugural Dean of the School of Public Policy. His research has always been about the political economy of reform: not what good policy looks like in theory, but why it succeeds or fails in practice, and what institutional conditions make credible commitments possible. These are the questions that boards and executive teams face when they try to read fiscal environments, assess sovereign risk, or understand why the same policy recommendation produces different outcomes in different countries.

Velasco’s engagement with global economic governance has been sustained and specific. He served on the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, co-chaired the Global Panel on the Future of the Multilateral Lending Institutions, and contributed to the World Bank–IMF High-Level Advisory Group on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth. He is now a member of the Group of Thirty – one of the most selective forums in international economic policy, comprising current and former central bank governors and finance ministers. His Project Syndicate column, published continuously since 2001, provides a public record of his analytical positions on populism, fiscal discipline, multilateralism, and democratic governance.

For organisations navigating a period in which fiscal policy has become explicitly political and multilateral institutions are under visible strain, Velasco offers something precise: the perspective of someone who has held the levers, studied the mechanisms, and continued to influence the debate at the highest institutional levels.

Key speaking topics

• Political economy of fiscal policy and economic reform
• Global economic governance and multilateral institutions
• Counter-cyclical fiscal policy and sovereign risk
• Macroeconomics of emerging markets
• Populism, democracy, and economic policymaking
• International financial institutions and development finance
• Geopolitical risk and global market conditions

Ideal for

• C-suite and board-level audiences in financial services, investment, and multinational corporations requiring strategic context on global fiscal and political risk
• Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Risk Officers navigating geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty
• Government affairs, public policy, and regulatory strategy teams
• International economic forums, sovereign wealth funds, and development finance institutions

Audience outcomes

• A clearer framework for reading fiscal and monetary policy decisions as political acts with structural constraints – not just technical outputs
• Specific insight into how multilateral institutions form, reform, and fail – and what that means for the economic environments businesses depend on
• Context for understanding the gap between policy intent and policy outcome in emerging and developed markets
• A more precise vocabulary for discussing sovereign risk, counter-cyclical strategy, and institutional credibility at board level
• Exposure to the live intellectual debate on global economic governance from someone actively shaping it