Embedded Files
Welcome!
María Ana Lugo is a Lead Economist for the Poverty Unit based in Beijing since July 2025. Prior to this, she was also the Program Leader for Human Development covering China, Mongolia and South Korea. She joined the World Bank in 2010 and, until moving to Beijing in early 2023, was based in Washington working on poverty and equity issues in Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia. Most recently, Maria Ana co-authored a report on Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China with the Development Research Center of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina.
A bit more about me ...
My background is in the fields of microeconomics theory, welfare economics, and development, with strong interests in concepts of well-being and in measures of poverty and inequality. I spent most of my doctorate and post-doctorate research wondering how to measure inequality and poverty when multiple dimensions of well-being are taken into account. I also worked on the impact of economic inequality on children's achievement at school, through the effect of social socioeconomic segregation, and on the bounding on test score estimates when selection is present. Since I joined the World Bank I focused on issues related to inequality of opportunities, and economic mobility, and on the distributional impact of food prices, energy subsidies, and fiscal policies, more broadly (taxation, subsidies and expenditure). More recently, I worked on China's economic transformation and poverty reduction, the role of fiscal policy to address inequality, and the distributional implications of decarbonization. Together with colleagues from private sector, I also led work on the impact of COVID-19 on households and firms, across 6 other East Asian countries. In addition, I co-led a global solution group where we developed tools for other poverty economists to analyze the distributional implications of policies, including fiscal policies, climate adaptation and mitigation policies, among others.
In my most recent assignment, I was the Lead Economist and Program Leader for Human Development for China, Mongolia and South Korea based in Beijing. I was responsible for overseeing health, education, and social protection programs in the three countries.
I am also an Affiliated Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, at CUNY, and a former council member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ).
Some quick links:
email: mlugo1@worldbank.org
CV (in pdf)
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse