Stanley Fischer 1943–2025
This blog was first published as a CGD Note on July 22, 2025
Stanley Fischer, the World Bank’s chief economist from January 1988 to August 1990, passed away on May 31, 2025. Stan Fischer’s immense professional contributions to modern macroeconomic and monetary policy, both as faculty at MIT and in the positions he held thereafter—as the first deputy managing director of the IMF (1994-2001), in running the Bank of Israel as its governor (2005–13), and finally as vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve (2014-17)—have all received much attention, and rightly so. But his contributions to the World Bank, his first “real world” job as he was fond of saying, have been less commented on and celebrated.
Stan did much at the World Bank, seizing the “opportunity to be in the policy world,” as he put it, getting into structural adjustment, stabilization, and the debt crisis.1 He talked about how wonderful his first-time visits to China and India were, how he was “gripped by the problem of development…a problem that hasn’t left me.” He spoke about how he had grown up in “a very small town in Northern Rhodesia for the first 13 years of my life…[and] so the development issues were with me all the time.” He also understood how unusually complex organizations like the World Bank work: “And so, I left with a much better idea of what mattered and what needed to be done.” Stan talked about how hard it was to readjust to academic life at MIT after the World Bank: “I remember going to theory seminars and saying to myself, what difference does it make whether this guy is right or wrong, why should anyone care about that theorem?” But readjust he did, even as he jumped back into the “real world” problems that he addressed so successfully in the rest of his public policy career.
In this tribute to Stan, I want to draw particular attention to an aspect of his contribution to the World Bank that is perhaps even less known: how Stan, in his relatively brief stay at the World Bank, opened the institution up to outside researchers and policymakers, enriching both the bank and the outsiders in the process. It is a matter of great satisfaction for me that this part of Stan’s legacy endures 35 years later in the form of the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics that he started in 1989, when I had the privilege of working with him on the conference.2 The World Bank and the Center for Global Development join hands this week to host the 36th Annual Bank conference in Washington, DC, in partnership this year with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
The special opportunity of working with Stan on the Annual Bank Conference came almost immediately on my joining the World Bank in January 1989. As with so many of his colleagues, I was fortunate enough to keep up with him in the years that followed, including hosting him 30 years later in July 2019 to deliver the keynote speech for the India Policy Forum at NCAER, the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi.3
Stan came up with the idea of the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics in late 1988, and the inaugural conference was held at the World Bank’s headquarters just a few months later in April 1989. On joining the bank as its deputy research administrator in a unit directly reporting to Stan, Dennis de Tray, the head of the unit, handed me the list of authors who had been commissioned to prepare papers for the conference, and assigned me the job of designing the rest of the conference, running it, and finally publishing the ABCDE proceedings volume as a special joint edition of the World Bank’s two research journals.
This gave me the terrific opportunity of working with Stan on the first ABCDE, the acronym Stan himself had coined for the conference, and of which he was quite proud with his typical, twinkle-in-the-eye, slightly mischievous, disarming smile. But “ABCDE” also had a more serious connotation for Stan. He always had in mind the idea that the ABCDE could provide the common language to allow bank staff and outside researchers and country policymakers to understand each other better, and to explore common concerns in neutral, objective, and evidence-driven ways.
In April 1998, Stan Fischer, by then the IMF’s first deputy managing director, reflected on the ABCDE when his successor twice removed, Joseph Stiglitz, invited him to deliver the keynote address to the 10th ABCDE. In his remarks, he recalled his time at the bank:
“I cannot think back to the start of these conferences without reflecting on my brief and happy years in the Bank, and I hope you will excuse me if I start by straying beyond the ABCDE… Let me say first how grateful and how proud I am to have served as Chief Economist of this remarkable institution, and thus to be part of a chain that includes Hollis Chenery, Anne Krueger, Larry Summers, Michael Bruno, and Joe Stiglitz, from all of whom we have all learned so much.”
Quoting from the editors’ Introduction to the first ABCDE Proceedings Volume, Stan noted in his 1998 Keynote Address, that
“the ABCDE was set up with the ultimate objective of improving both member country and Bank policymaking, by enhancing the knowledge base. The goals were to open up the Bank to outside ideas and problems, and if possible, to help shape the research agendas of those thinking about development outside the Bank.”
I remember Stan being particularly happy with the second paragraph of this Introduction that I had prepared in draft, which noted,
“Outside researchers and Bank researchers have much to offer each other. Academics and other outside researchers can and do bring different and new ways of thinking to the Bank. That is especially important for an institution as large, as busy, and as involved in policy in so many countries, as the Bank. The temptation for Bank researchers is to look inward, to talk to each other, and to assume that shared habits of thought are the right ones. Although academics too share certain modes of thought, the differences between the two groups are potentially productive. In addition, the best academics are probably closer to the cutting edge of research; they are also more free to think speculatively and to develop new theories and fresh insights.”
A 1995 external evaluation of the first seven ABCDEs described the ABCDE’s goals in even more precise detail as a two-way street:
- to expose World Bank economists to fresh insights and recent developments in economics, which are influencing views outside the bank and may potentially alter bank policy advice;
- to direct attention to a set of issues that are of critical interest to a wide spectrum of development practitioners;
- to induce leading researchers to explore and account for the real-world implications of their work, and to incorporate the World Bank's practical knowledge of developing and transitional countries in their analyses; and
- to improve policymaking in the World Bank and its member countries by enhancing our understanding of economic processes.
To achieve these ambitious goals, we developed a structure for the first ABCDE that went well beyond the standard academic conference. First, we made sure the conference was not packed with too many papers but allowed substantial time for comments and discussion on each paper, including from the floor. We eschewed parallel sessions for that reason. In addition to the authors of the six commissioned papers and their 12 discussants, we invited more than 50 participants from around the world to join these discussions, the majority from developing countries, many of them prominent researchers and policymakers. We solicited recommendations from the bank’s regional chief economists and research managers for whom to invite, urging them to set up post-conference meetings for the invitees where they were likely to benefit both the visitors and Bank staff.4
The 1989 ABCDE authors were asked to review and assess the policy implications of six distinct subjects rather than a single theme, reflecting our desire to communicate across a broad spectrum of development practitioners rather than among a group of research specialists in a narrow field. This broad approach marked at least the first four ABCDEs. It allowed room for completely new themes, such as military expenditures and development in a post-Cold War world, featured by three papers for the 1991 ABCDE, including one by Robert McNamara.5
Stan early on asked whom we should invite to deliver the inaugural ABCDE keynote address. Without much hesitation, I suggested Manmohan Singh, whom I had met several times when he was the deputy chairman of the Indian Planning Commission, but who had more recently stepped away from India to serve as the secretary-general of the South Commission in Geneva. Stan agreed immediately, sensing a kindred spirit in Singh of an academic turned policymaker. In a wide-ranging speech, Singh, the soon-to-be finance minister and architect of India’s economic liberalization, and eventually the prime minister of India, focused his address on “Development Policy Research: The Task Ahead.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, for the keynote address at the second ABCDE in April 1990, we invited Václav Klaus, Czechoslovakia’s finance minister and a key player in the historic transition then underway in his country, and subsequently the president of the Czech Republic. Klaus gave a spellbinding first-hand view of the transition from a command economy to a market-driven one after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
Stan also readily accepted another suggestion in the spirit of open dialogue that he believed the ABCDE should foster. This was to end each conference with a roundtable discussion with some of the most prominent researchers in development economics. For the 1989 ABCDE roundtable, we asked the six panelists to identify important issues needing urgent attention in development policy research.[6] For the next year, Stan had the idea of focusing the roundtable on “Development Strategies: The Role of the State and the Private Sector,” addressing some of the issues central to the World Development Report 1991: The Challenge of Development, then under preparation.7
As with most World Bank-wide initiatives, attention soon turned to measuring the impact of the ABCDE, both within the bank and outside. An interesting measure of its impact on mainstream bank work was discussed in the FY1990 Annual Report on Research to the World Bank Board, noting that
“the 1990 ABCDE paper by Ian Little and James Mirrlees on "Project Appraisal and Planning: Twenty Years On" has become widely regarded as the authoritative re-examination of the field and of Bank practice in this important area. In conjunction with other internal reviews already underway on this topic, this effort is likely to lead to a systematic revision of the Bank's project evaluation guidelines, its implementation procedures, and the intellectual climate for project analysis in the Bank.”8
Citation analysis provided a measure of the ABCDE volume’s early impact outside the World Bank. A standard citation index for 1993 showed the World Bank’s two journals ranked the highest among journals devoted to development economics, with the citation index for the ABCDE Proceedings volume exceeding those of the two bank journals.9
Stan noted in his 1998 ABCDE address that the ABCDE was formally reviewed in 1995 by an eminent external panel “who pronounced themselves on the whole satisfied.”10 The Annual Report on Research for FY1994 and FY1995 reported on the evaluation in greater detail as follows:
“The external reviewers praised the conferences and especially the proceedings volumes, and recommended that they be continued. The conference series was seen as "a serious contribution to the purposes of the Bank," serving as an "ingenious device for facilitating communication among academics, economists from research institutions, policymakers, and World Bank staff." The reviewers agreed that the conference papers are written "at a very high level, deal with important current issues, ... have potential influences on policy, ... [and] should be widely circulated," with "most of the papers [being] both well written and accessible to a professional audience." The proceedings volumes have the "unique function of ... attempt[ing] to appeal via the linkages to academics, researchers, and practitioners alike," and no "other conference or symposium [is] more effective in linking thought, policy formulation, and implementation."11
Much has been written in the tributes to Stan that speaks to his friendliness, compassion, and consensus-seeking style, in addition to his willingness to listen calmly and act under the most trying of circumstances, “the closest thing the world economy has to a battlefield medic,” as the New York Times called him. I experienced this geniality frequently in the work with Stan, including in the co-editing of the ABCDE Proceedings volume, and many years later when he visited NCAER.
Stan’s stamp on the ABCDE and its goals continued unchanged in the two ABCDEs that Larry Summers, Stan’s successor at the World Bank, and I ran. Larry, now CGD’s board chair, has noted in his tribute to Stan,
“We all were shaped by his clarity of thought, intellectual balance, personal decency, and quality of character. In a broader sense, everyone who was involved in the macro policy enterprise was Stan Fischer’s disciple. People all over the world who never knew his name lived better, more secure lives because of all that he did through his teaching, writing, and service.”
The ABCDE remains an enduring example of Stan’s remarkable legacy at the World Bank, his first foray into his “real world” role from which he never looked back.
So, it only fitting that the ABCDE this year is dedicated to the memory of Stan Fischer. I am grateful for this gracious gesture to the three ABCDE collaborators: the World Bank, the Center for Global Development, and the LKY School of Public Policy.
1) Fischer’s quotations in this paragraph are from his interview with Olivier Blanchard in April 2004, Interview of Stanley Fischer by Olivier Blanchard, Working Paper 05-12, MIT Dept. of Economics, April 19, 2005.
2) Besides the ABCDE, Stan started the Bank’s Visiting Research Fellows Program in 1989, which I ran for its first four years, bringing to the Bank 40 senior and junior researchers and policymakers, 22 of them from developing countries.
3) Stanley Fischer, ‘Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy,” the 16th India Policy Forum Lecture, July 9, 2019, National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi. [Available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgsKIemEHLo].
4) Kaushik Basu was one of those invited to the first ABCDE while he was at the Delhi School of Economics in India. He was puzzled first at the invitation that gave him no specific role, but nonetheless pleased that he was able to attend; 25 years later, he remembered this invitation when he ran the ABCDE as the chief economist of the World Bank. Opening Remarks by Kaushik Basu at the ABCDE 2014, June 14, 2014, Washington DC.
5) These 1991 papers were: Robert S. McNamara, “The Post-Cold War World: Implications for Military Expenditure in the Developing Countries”; Mary Kaldor, “After the Cold War: Obstacles and Opportunities in Cutting Arms Budgets”; and Saadet Deger and Somnath Sen, “Military Expenditure, Aid, and Economic Development,” Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1991, World Bank, March 1992.
6) The 1989 roundtable panelists were Jagdish Bhagwati (Columbia), Aklilu Habte (World Bank), Anne Krueger (Duke), Roberto Macedo (Sao Paulo), T. Paul Schulz (Yale), Ammar Siamwalla (TDRI), and Stan Fischer, who moderated.
7) The 1990 ABCDE roundtable featured Amartya Sen (Harvard), Nicholas Stern (LSE) and Joseph Stiglitz (Stanford), again moderated by Stan Fischer.
8) Report on the World Bank Research Program−Part I, Report No. 9092, Office of the Senior Vice President, Policy, Research and External Affairs, World Bank, December 1990.
9) Report on the World Bank Research Program Fiscal 1994 and 1995, Report No. 15296, Office of the Senior Vice President, Development Economics and Chief Economist, World Bank, January 1996.
10) The evaluators were Koichi Hamada (Yale), Michael Intriligator (UCLA), Robert E.B. Lucas (Boston), Gerald Meier (Stanford), and James A. Mirrlees (Cambridge).
11) Report on the World Bank Research Program: Fiscal 1994 and 1995, Op. cit.
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