Chief Economist & Director General, Asian Development Bank

Dr. Yasuyuki SAWADA is the Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Director General of its Economic Research and Regional Cooperation Department. He is the chief spokesperson for ADB on economic and development trends, and leads the production and dissemination of ADB’s flagship knowledge products, as well as ADB’s support for various regional cooperation fora such as ASEAN+3 and APEC. Before joining ADB, Mr. Sawada was Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo. He has worked at the ADB Institute in Tokyo and served as consultant for various projects at the World Bank Group. A leading figure in development economics and applied microeconometrics, he has served as a visiting professor at Stanford University’s Stanford Center for International Development and adjunct professor of economics at Korea University. He did research in a variety of institutions, such as the Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute and the World Bank, where he led a number of large-scale development policy evaluation projects in Asia and other developing countries. His key research areas are macro- and micro-development economics, microeconometrics, economics of disasters, and field surveys and experiments. Mr. Sawada obtained his Ph.D. in Economics and his Master’s degree in International Development Policy from Stanford University.