Transcript of Oral History Interview with Shantayanan Devarajan - May 25-27, 2022

Jul 19, 2026

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The transcript records an oral history interview with Dr. Shanta Devarajan, focusing on his early background and long career at the World Bank, including his work as a research assistant and his leadership roles in economic policy. It details how his mathematical training supported economic modeling, and describes research on the Muda Irrigation Project using simulation models. It further explains computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, how they capture ripple effects of policy changes across markets, and their application to development topics such as structural adjustment, trade policy, exchange rates, and tax policy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages98

Reading Time4 h 7 min

AccessFree to download

Interview Overview

Early Background and World Bank Entry

Research on the Muda Irrigation Project

Link Between Mathematics and Economics

CGE Models and Policy Applications

Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized THE WORLD BANK GROUP ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH SHANTAYANAN DEVARAJAN Interview By: John Heath May 25-27, 2022 Washington, D.C. [Transcribed from a digital sound recording] Session 1 May 25, 2022 Washington, D.C. HEATH: Today is the 25th of May 2022, and we're coming to you from Washington, D.C. On behalf of the World Bank Group Archives Oral History Program, I am John Heath, and my interviewee today is Dr. Shanta Devarajan, late of the World Bank and, since 2019, professor of the Practice of International Development at Georgetown University. Shanta was a World Bank staff member from 1991 to 2019. His distinguished career at the Bank included posts as chief economist in three regions: South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa. He also directed the 2004 World Development Report which addressed the topic of access to services by the poor. Shanta, welcome to the program. I'd like to start with a bit of your early background if you could just bear with me. You were born in Sri Lanka in 1954 but left Colombo at the age of eight to accompany your father, who worked for the United Nations, meaning that you grew up in New York City and Geneva. Your BA and Master's were in mathematics. For your PhD, you switched to economics, which you studied at the University of California-Berkeley, completing the degree in 1981. Before that, in 1975 to be exact, at the precociously early age of 21, you worked for a year at the Bank as a research assistant. Let's begin there. What was the nature of your work in 1975, and what are your recollections of the Bank and of Washington at that time? DEVARAJAN: First, to say thanks very much for doing this. It's a pleasure to be here with you, John. Yes, it's, by the way--and I was not there for a year. I worked there for a summer. I was a summer intern in 1975, and it was interesting because I was working as a research assistant for Clive Bell, who was in the Research Department. And we were doing a study of the impact of an irrigation project in Malaysia, the Muda Irrigation Project, and what we did was build a model to simulate the impact of that irrigation project and the multiple rounds that increased consumption will have on the local economy. And the truth is that Clive Bell and I hit it off so well that I kept coming back for two or three summers after that, even when I was in graduate school at Berkeley, to continue working on this, and we've been collaborating since then for 40 years. I mean, we're still in touch. We just wrote a paper about 10 years ago as well on a different topic. So this was the beginning of my introduction not just to the World Bank but to the whole development profession. HEATH: So ifI remember correctly, Clive was--came from the University of Sussex in Development Studies Center. DEVARAJAN: That's right, exactly. HEATH: Yes. DEVARAJAN: Exactly, he was a professor at Sussex. So then he was at the Bank for, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 years in the Research Department. Then he was a professor at Vanderbilt and then subsequently in Germany—he's at Heidelberg. HEATH: Right. So I guess you got this job because you were a maths whiz. DEVARAJAN: Possibly. HEATH: Is that right? DEVARAJAN: Yeah. I mean, actually, the connection to the World Bank was through Sherman Robinson, who was a professor of mine at Princeton, who subsequently also worked at the Bank. And Sherman, I should say, was responsible for my becoming an economist because he--I was a math major, and I was interested in mathematics. But he, Sherman, at that time was building some of these--the early general equilibrium models for which it was helpful to have a strong math background, and so he got me involved. We worked on a model of Korea, which I did for my junior paper, which is one of the--which is like a thesis at Princeton. And at some point, Sherman mentio

FAQs

What was Dr. Devarajan’s early work at the World Bank in 1975?

He worked as a summer intern and research assistant in 1975, helping Clive Bell study the impact of Malaysia’s Muda Irrigation Project using a simulation model.

How did Dr. Devarajan’s education shape his career in economics?

He began with mathematics for his BA and Master’s, then switched to economics for his PhD at UC Berkeley. His math background supported his involvement in early general equilibrium modeling.

What are computable general equilibrium (CGE) models used for in the interview?

CGE models simulate how changes in one market—such as a tax adjustment—affect supply, demand, substitution across goods, income, and policy-driven ripple effects across the economy.

Jul 19, 2026

Upload by Logic