Kamal Saggi Ph. D. University of Pennsylvania Professor of Economics and Director, Graduate Program in Economic Development kamal.saggi@vanderbilt.edu

Dr. Kamal Saggi is Professor of Economics and the Director of the Graduate Program in Economic Development at Vanderbilt University. He is currently an Associate Editor at the Journal of International Economics and at the Indian Growth and Development Review. He is also a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly of Columbia University; an Associate Fellow of CIREQ, a joint research center housed in McGill University, Concordia University, and the University of Montreal; and a past Secretary (2006-09) of the International Economics and Finance Society.

Dr. Saggi graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Economics in 1990. During his undergraduate years at Ohio Wesleyan (1987-90), Dr. Saggi was the recipient of a full-tuition Presidential Scholarship and won several major honors. Most notably, in 1990 he won the Outstanding Economics Graduate Award and the Florence Leas Prize in Mathematics.

In 1990, Dr. Saggi was awarded a doctoral fellowship by the Department of Economics of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). At Penn, Dr. Saggi was chosen as a Training Leader for teaching assistants and received the Joel Popkin Outstanding Student Teaching Award in 1992. He graduated from Penn with a Ph.D. in Economics in 1995 and joined Southern Methodist University (SMU) as an Assistant Professor of Economics where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2004. From 2006-09, he served as the Chairman of SMU’s Economics Department and from 2001-06 as its Director of Graduate Studies. At SMU, Dr. Saggi received several research grants from the University Research Council and the World Bank. In 2003, his research accomplishments earned him an inaugural Ford Research Fellowship, the highest research recognition awarded to SMU faculty. In 2007, he was named the Dedman Distinguished Collegiate Professor of Economics at SMU.

Dr. Saggi has been a visiting scholar at Hitotsubashi University; Lingnan University; Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; McGill University; National University of Singapore; Princeton University (twice), Stanford University’s Center for International Development, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney (twice), World Bank (multiple times with the Development Economics Research Group), and the World Trade Organization. He has given numerous invited seminars at universities through-out the world and at think-tanks and policy institutions such as the International Trade Commission, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

Most of Dr. Saggi’s research lies in the areas of international trade and investment, international technology transfer, economic development, and the global trading system. His research has been published in leading economics journals such as the Economic Journal, European Economic Review, International Economic Review, Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of International Economics.

Dr. Saggi has extensive consulting experience in the areas of international trade and economic development. He has been a consultant for the Andean Development Corporation, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Finance Corporation, the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, SciDev.Net, and four major divisions of the World Bank: The Development Economics Research Group, Global Economic Prospects, World Development Report, and the World Bank Institute.

For more information on Professor Saggi visit https://my.vanderbilt.edu/kamalsaggi/

To see a list of former GPED Directors, click here.