Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank who works at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology, and political science to study the social and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries.
His early work included research on dowries, domestic violence, and sex work. His 2004 edited book with Mike Walton, Culture and Public Action, instigated a conversation between anthropologists and economists to open up (then) new questions on the role of aspirations, inequality traps, and cultural heritage. He has had a long-standing interest in political economy and democratic decentralization in India. He is a proponent of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods to make economics more reflexive, and to better understand and diagnose issues in development. Lately, he has been experimenting with AI and NLP to develop tools to analyze open-ended qualitative interviews at scale applying the method to study aspirations for children and to understand and measure well-being using narrative data. He and Ghazala Mansuri co-authored Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?, and with Paromita Sanyal he co-authored Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies.
From 2010 to 2020 he ran the World Bank's Social Observatory which was an effort to improve the adaptive capacity of large-scale anti-poverty projects by embedding researchers within project implementation teams where inter-disciplinary research was tailored toward the project’s practical needs.
Dr. Rao has a BA in Economics from St. Xavier’s College – Mumbai and a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He held appointments at the University of Chicago, Michigan, Williams College, and Brown University, before joining the World Bank’s research department in 1999. He is a Fellow of the International Economics Association, and a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
