Gita Gopinath, First deputy managing director, International Monetary Fund
Imaging: Kapil Kashyap
Gita Gopinath, 53, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has made a mark in the area of global finance and macroeconomics. She influences critical policy decisions in trade, investment, debt and interest rates.
Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan says, “After an extraordinary career as an academic, Gopinath has helped steer the IMF through difficult times, both as its chief economist and as its first deputy managing director. Her achievements on the world stage should make every Indian proud.”
Gopinath was born in Kolkata and completed her school education in Mysuru. After graduating from Lady Shri Ram College for Women in Delhi, she joined the Delhi School of Economics for a master’s degree, and pursued a PhD from Princeton University in 2001. She had the opportunity to learn from revered economists such as Kenneth Rogoff and former US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
She started her career as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2001. After four years, Gopinath worked as the Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics at Harvard University’s economics department. Between 2019 and 2022, the academician, who has written a wide range of research articles on policy issues and financial crises in developed and emerging markets, served as the IMF’s first woman chief economist, bringing her experience and skills to help navigate the global economic crisis unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In January 2022, at a time when the world was struggling to recover from the pandemic, Gopinath was appointed as the first deputy managing director of the Fund, making her second in command at the IMF.
At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in January, Gopinath spoke about her six-year journey as she led the IMF, navigated multiple challenges, and her outlook for global growth in 2025.
“These have been six very fascinating years dealing with the pandemic, dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis that has followed. So, there is a lot that we have seen,” she said. “I’ve come to appreciate more the importance of each country’s specific circumstances and how they have to deal with a similar shock that everybody faces. Countries are very different. They have a different history. They have a different way of economic thinking and that does matter for us when we engage with them in terms of economic policies.”
The IMF expects global GDP to grow by 3.3 percent, and pegs India GDP growth at 6.5 percent, in the current calendar year. Gopinath cautioned that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about policies around the world. “Be it trade policies, there’s immigration, there is investment and private investment and where it can go and so on,” she said. “Borrowing costs are elevated and for several countries their currencies have depreciated relative to the dollar and those can pose challenges.”
Admist the chaos, however, Gopinath pointed out, there are opportunities too. One, new technologies can potentially raise productivity and improve global GDP by 0.8 percent. Two, countries can reimagine supply chains. Most importantly, Gopinath emphasised, leaders should prioritise being agile, and governments should focus on inclusive and resilient growth.
As a leader in a fast-changing world, Gopinath said she believed it was important to not be caught in an echo chamber, and to encourage people to speak freely and honestly for a diversity of opinions: “I should point out that what is very important to me is to make sure that people think that they can disagree with me about how I see certain things.”
When it comes to India, Gopinath believes that to become a developed economy by 2047, India must focus on investing in infrastructure, developing a skilled workforce, and building institutions that support social and economic development. Speaking at the Delhi School of Economics Diamond Jubilee Lecture in August last year, she suggested that India needed to reduce tariffs to gain an edge in global markets as its tariffs are higher than its peer economies.
“This is going to be a year with a lot of important policy shifts around the world. So, focusing on how you can build resilience in your economy to these developments is going to be absolutely critical,” she highlighted at Davos. “We are concerned that our medium-term growth projections are some of the weakest we’ve had in decades. So, the world as a whole needs to invest more in growth.”
Despite the uncertainty and policy shifts worldwide, Gopinath said she remained hopeful in human ingenuity and technological developments. “And it’s the job of institutions like the IMF to make sure that technological promise is made available to all countries and all people,” she said.