James Anderson (Jim) is a Lead Public Sector Specialist for the East Asia and Pacific Region. Jim started his career as a development economist in Mongolia where he lived from 1993 through 1997, researching institutional reform, the informal sector, and the impacts of large-scale privatization. In 1997, Jim took his interest in institutions and empirical tools and began to apply them to governance challenges, notably anticorruption and judicial reform, in the transition countries of central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He moved to Vietnam in 2008 and focused his attention on access to information, transparency, anticorruption, and human rights. Jim served as the Country Manager for Mongolia from 2014 through August 2018, supporting the World Bank’s program in all fields, and from 2018 to 2023 he was Global Lead for Anticorruption. He currently focuses on the East Asia and Pacific region, working in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, and others. Jim remains a “governance data junkie”, making no effort to kick the habit. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland and did his undergraduate studies at UMBC.