"Monetary policy should remain data-dependent, be well communicated, and ensure that inflation expectations remain anchored." -Gita Gopinath
The India-born International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist, Gita Gopinath puts up a solution to each economical issue that occurs and for that, she believes that data dependence, better communication, and pointed strong target makes a monetary policy stand out as a meaningful one.
Better and extraordinary understanding of economics makes Gita Gopinath stand in the list of the world's top economists. At the age of 49, she has worked as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in 2001. She joined the University of Harvard and worked as a tenured professor in 2010. She is now the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics at Harvard's Economics department. Gopinath is the third woman, and second Indian to be made a permanent member of the economics department at Harvard after Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
Gita Gopinath was born on 8 December 1971, in Kolkata, whose family moved to Karnataka when she 9-year-old. She finished her schooling at Nirmala Convent School in Mysore. She studied science from Mahajana PU College, Mysore, and then she pursued BA Hons Economics from Lady Sriram College for women in 1992, University of Delhi. She got her masters degree in economics from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi 1994. Later she joined the University of Washington and completed her M.A in 1996.
Having a background in science, Gopinath moved towards economics and finance. For that she says, "When I was doing my bachelor's from Delhi University, India experienced its first major external financing and currency crisis in 1990-91. This inspired me to pursue graduate work in economics and was the foundation for my interest in international finance."
Gopinath once loved athletics that she given upon to focus on her studies and then she looked behind. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2001 after finishing a doctoral dissertation titled "Three essays on international capital flows: a search theoretic approach," under the supervision of Ben Bernanke and Kenneth Rogoff. While doing her doctoral research at Princeton, she was awarded Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Research Award.
She was announced as the Chief Economist of IMF in October 2018 and she assumed the office from 1st January 2019. She is the second Indian to hold the post, after former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan. Right now she is on leave of public service from Harvard University.
Gopinath has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. She was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and was named one of the top 25 economists under 45 by the International Monetary Fund in 2014. In 2019, Foreign Policy named her one of the Top Global Thinkers. Gopinath has been awarded Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, which is the highest honor for a person of Indian origin, by the President of India.
"Being born into a Malayali family that followed a matriarchal system, I always felt loved and had a high sense of self-worth."
Behind her success with confidence and leadership skills, she credits her upbringing in a matriarchal family where women are the head of the family.
