Ian Goldin

Why organisations work with Ian Goldin

• He predicted in The Butterfly Defect (2014) that a pandemic would be the most likely cause of the next global financial shock, six years before COVID. Boards looking for genuine foresight on systemic risk treat that record as evidence, not branding.
• He forecasts growth prospects across regions, including the US, Europe, China, and Asia, and across sectors such as manufacturing, banking, and AI. Asset allocators, central banks, and multinational boards use that view to stress-test capital and operating decisions over a five to fifteen year horizon.
• Few speakers carry both operating and academic authority on globalisation: Vice President of the World Bank, Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and Founding Director of the Oxford Martin School.
• His work translates directly into capital and policy decisions on geoeconomics, supply chains, urbanisation, and the impact of AI on jobs and development. These are the live questions on most international boards heading into the late 2020s.
• He moderates and facilitates as well as keynotes. Clients including J.P. Morgan and pharmaceutical and legal industry events have used him to open and connect multi-day programmes, shape agendas, and chair leadership conversations on top of delivering the headline keynote.

Biography highlights

• Vice President of the World Bank (2003-2006) and Director of Development Policy (2001-2003).
• Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (1996-2001), advising President Nelson Mandela.
• Founding Director of the Oxford Martin School (2006-2016), establishing 45 research programmes and over 500 affiliated academics.
• Professor of Globalisation and Development, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow at Balliol College.
• Author of 25 books including The Butterfly Defect (Princeton, 2014), Age of the City (Bloomsbury, 2023, FT Best Books of 2023), and The Shortest History of Migration (Old Street, 2024).
• Writer and presenter of three BBC documentary series, including After the Crash and The Pandemic that Changed the World, and the BBC Analysis The Death of Globalisation (2023).

Biography

In 2014, The Butterfly Defect argued that the next major global financial shock was most likely to come from a pandemic running through the connective tissue of globalisation. Six years later, COVID proved the case. The book, written with Mike Mariathasan and published by Princeton, was Ian Goldin’s clearest statement of a thesis he had been building for two decades: globalisation has produced extraordinary gains and a new class of systemic risk that institutions are not yet built to manage.

That argument carries weight because of where it comes from. Goldin was Vice President of the World Bank and, before that, Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, where he advised President Nelson Mandela through the early post-apartheid years. He was Principal Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and a Programme Director at the OECD in Paris. The institutions sit behind the books.

At Oxford, he founded the Oxford Martin School in 2006 and ran it for a decade, building 45 research programmes across more than 100 disciplines. He now leads three Oxford Martin programmes on technological and economic change, the future of work, and the future of development. His books, 25 in total, run from Exceptional People on migration to Age of the City on urban futures, with The Shortest History of Migration arriving in 2024.

What boards and governments use him for is harder than topic coverage. It is the ability to connect migration, AI, climate, and supply chain stress into a coherent picture of where capital, talent, and political risk are moving over a five to fifteen year horizon, with the operational scars to know which policy moves actually land.

Key speaking topics

• Economic growth prospects across countries, regions, and sectors
• Geopolitics, geoeconomics, and the fracturing rules-based order
• Systemic risk and globalisation
• AI, jobs, and the future of work
• The future of cities and urbanisation
• Long-horizon scenarios and crisis recovery
• Migration and demographic change

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees of multinationals navigating geopolitical exposure, supply chain risk, and growth divergence across regions.
• Government, central bank, and multilateral audiences setting policy on development, AI, and climate.
• Investor and asset-allocator forums sizing long-horizon risk across regions and sectors.
• CSOs, heads of strategy, and CFOs responsible for capital decisions under macro and political uncertainty.

Audience outcomes

• A clearer reading of how today’s shocks connect: pandemics, AI, migration, climate, and political fracture as one system.
• Specific arguments and evidence boards can use when stress-testing strategy against the next decade of global change.
• A sharper view of how growth prospects diverge across regions and sectors, and what that means for capital allocation, supply chains, and talent strategy.
• Confidence to challenge assumptions baked into long-range plans, sourced from someone who has run the institutions setting global policy.