Indian-born US citizen Gita Gopinath, who joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2019 as chief economist – the first woman to serve in that role – will leave her post of deputy managing director at the end of August to return to Harvard University, said the IMF in a statement on Monday.
The financial institution’s Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, will name Gopinath’s successor in “due course”, the statement added.
The decision to leave IMF seems to have been initiated by Gopinath, who was teaching at the Ivy League university before she joined the IMF. She will resume her career as a professor of economics at the university which has been caught in the crosshairs of US President Donald Trump’s ire after it rejected the Trump administration’s demands to alter its governance, hiring, and admission practices, including revealing information of students with specific political ideologies.
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Georgieva said Gopinath joined the organisation as a highly respected academic and proved to be an “exceptional intellectual leader” during her time, which included the pandemic and global economic downturn caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Gopinath became the first deputy managing director in January, 2022, and oversaw the fund’s analytical work on fiscal and monetary policy, debt, and international trade.
“Gita steered the Fund’s analytical and policy work with clarity, striving for the highest standards of rigorous analysis at a complex time of high uncertainty and rapidly changing global economic environment," Georgieva said.
No comment was immediately available from the US Treasury, which manages the dominant US shareholding in the IMF.
Usually, it’s the European countries that choose the Fund’s managing director, while the US Treasury recommends candidates for the first managing director role.
In her statement, Gopinath said she was grateful for a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to work at the IMF, and thanked both Georgieva and the previous IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, who appointed her as chief economist.
"I now return to my roots in academia, where I look forward to continuing to push the research frontier in international finance and macroeconomics to address global challenges, and to training the next generation of economists," she said.
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