José Antonio Ocampo

José Antonio Ocampo is the Will Clayton Fellow in International Economics at the Baker Institute. Until mid-2007, he was the United Nations under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs. In this post, he directed the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs and chaired the United Nations’ Executive Committee on Economic and Social Affairs. Before assuming this position, Ocampo was executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1998 to 2003, as well as serving in several government positions in his native country of Colombia, including minister of finance and public credit, director of the National Planning Department and minister of agriculture.

In the academic world, he has been the director of the Foundation for Higher Education and Development (Fedesarrollo); a professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of the Andes, and at the National University in Colombia; and a visiting professor at Yale, Cambridge and Oxford Universities. He is currently a professor of professional practice at Columbia University. He has authored many books and articles on macroeconomic theory and policy, economic development, international trade and economic history.

Ocampo studied economics and sociology at the University of Notre Dame, United States, where he graduated in 1972. He earned a doctorate in economics at Yale University in 1976 and received the Alejandro Angel Escobar National Science Award in Colombia in 1988. In 2008, he won the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.