Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. She co-founded CGD in November 2001 with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott, Jr. and served as president until 2016. Prior to becoming the President of CGD, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, At the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, Birdsall spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as director of the Policy Research Department. Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and over 100 articles in scholarly journals and monographs, published in English and Spanish. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals. Birdsall's has been researching and writing about the issue of economic development for more than 25 years. Her most recent work concentrates on the relationship between income distribution and economic growth and the role of regional public goods in development.
Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a focus on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. In November 2001, Birdsall co-founded the Center for Global Development —just two months after September 11 attacks on the United States—with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott, Jr. In a 2016 interview, Birdsell said that the establishment of the CGD coincided "with a shift in thinking among US politicians" in which they began to accept the idea that nurturing stable and prosperous countries overseas, would result in "direct benefits" to the United States—an idea that underpinned the work of the CGD. She served as CGD president until 2016 and remained as Senior Fellow and President Emeritus. In 2006 Birdsall published the online version of Rescuing the World Bank: A CGD Working Group Report and Selected Essays. Birdsall was the co-author of the 2014 Towards a Better Global Economy Policy Implications for Citizens Worldwide in the 21st Century, published by Oxford University Press. In 2011, she co-authored the Foreign Affairs article, "The Post-Washington Consensus: Development after the Crisis", with the author of The End of History—Francis Fukuyama—in which they predicted that the financial crisis marked the "end of American economic dominance in global affairs." They wrote that the November 2008 meeting of G20 heads of state—which unlike the G7—includes emerging BRIC countries. The inaugural 2008 meeting in Washington, D.C., in which the G20 coordinated a "global stimulus program", became an "established international institution." A 2012 Washington Post article cited Birdsall, who called on the World Bank to develop a "larger and clearer mandate." She said that the wealthier developing nations should lead the World Bank's transformation into an institution that "could become the focal point for projects to cope with climate change or other major risks to the “global commons." If it failed to do so, it would "gradually become merely one of many aid agencies dealing with a smaller and smaller group of low-income fragile states."
