María E. Dávalos is a Senior Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice focusing on the Europe and Central Asia Region (ECA). She joined the Bank in 2010 through the World Bank’s Young Professionals Program, and started working on poverty and equity in the Latin America region. She currently leads the gender and poverty programs for the Western Balkans, and is the poverty economist for Albania working on the distributional impact of fiscal policies. She has also worked on the Systematic Country Diagnostics for Albania and Moldova, the ECA regional agenda on economic mobility, the analytical work on the EU refugee crisis, the ECA regional jobs report, and the “missing girls” research program in the South Caucasus. Maria is also co-leading a lending operation on equity and gender in the Western Balkans. She obtained a Master’s Degree in economic policy management at the Centre for Studies and Research on International Development (France) and was a Fulbright scholar at Fordham University (New York), where she obtained her PhD in economics.