Reena Badiani-Magnusson is a Senior Economist and Program Leader in the Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions department of the World Bank. Reena joined the World Bank in 2010, and has worked across East Asia and the Pacific, while based in Thailand and Myanmar, in the European Union, while based in Belgium and Sweden, and DR Congo, while based in Kinshasa. Reena’s interests as an economist span multiple domains in the field, and as a result she has worked on various topics from fiscal policy, distributional analysis, the sustainable heating transition and green transition more broadly, behavioral impediments to development impact, impact evaluation, social protection systems, including conditional cash transfers, and education financing reforms.
She has led and contributed to several Bank lending operations, including the Clean Air Program for Results in Poland, Development Policy Operations and the Myanmar Grants and Stipends Project, as well as analytical products from EU Regular Economic Reports, Country Economic Memorandums, Public Finance Reviews, Job diagnostics, poverty assessments, among others. Prior to joining the World Bank, she worked extensively in India and spent several months at the International Crop Research Institute in the Semi-Arid Tropics. She started her early career at Arthur Andersen in London, worked as a non-staff writer to the Statesman’s Yearbook, and consulted for the OECD. Reena holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University, and a Master’s degree in Environmental and Natural Resources Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics. She has published in peer-reviewed journals on topics ranging from groundwater deterioration, electricity subsidies and agriculture to migration and healthcare reforms.