Dr. Daniel Kaufmann is an international leader in governance, anti-corruption and natural resource management. He is a senior fellow at Results for Development (R4D), an Advisory Board member of the Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption (LTRC) program and president emeritus at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) where he served as president and CEO from 2013-2020. He is also affiliated with the Brookings Institution and the faculty of economics of the University of Philippines.
Dr. Kaufmann has provided technical expertise and capacity to advance several projects under the LTRC initiative including the Brookings Sanctions Tracker, a comprehensive global database of thousands of targeted financial sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the LTRC report “The Audacity Deficit in Natural Resource Governance: Insights from a Survey and Implications Ahead”, a comprehensive analysis of nearly 400 respondents on priorities for the natural resource governance field.
In the past, Dr. Kaufmann was director at the World Bank Institute, where he led a program to address governance and corruption. He also held other leadership positions at the World Bank focusing on finance, regulation and anti-corruption and was also a lead economist for the economies in transition as well as in the research department. In the early nineties, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became the first chief of mission of the World Bank to Ukraine.
He has served as a member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) international board, as well as various advisory boards including the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Group on Anti-Corruption and Integrity and Inter-American Development Bank’s President High-Level Advisory Group on Transparency.
He also held a visiting scholar position at Harvard University and was a member of the Global Agenda Council and faculty of the World Economic Forum. Occasionally he also lectures on opera, politics, and the interface between the two.
Dr. Kaufmann’s research on economic development, governance and corruption, and natural resources has been published in leading academic journals. He has also co-authored a set of widely used global indicators, such as the Worldwide Governance Indicators, as well as the Resource Governance Index, and with colleagues he also pioneered the study and empirical analysis of “legal corruption” and state capture. He is one of the most downloaded social scientists in the SSRN portal.
His academic writings spanning a number of areas in the social sciences can be accessed here. His policy work has been regularly featured in international print media, as well as online and broadcast media interviews, including a series of RAW Talks on resource policy and governance, the recent discussion on the need for a revamp of the field of natural resource governance (based on work conducted with colleagues at R4D) and a Kickback interview on State Capture.
Dr. Kaufmann, a native Spanish speaker from Chile, received his MA and PhD in economics at Harvard and a BA in economics and statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
