Tara Béteille is currently the World Bank’s Lead Economist and Human Development Program Leader for the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, based in Manila. Before this she served as the Program Leader for Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. Tara served as the Global Lead for the World Bank’s Teachers Thematic Group from 2017 till 2021. Her areas of operational expertise include early childhood education, teacher labor markets, skills, higher education and the political economy of education, having led projects in multiple regions in the world, including South Asia and East Asia and Pacific. Tara was a core team member of the World Development Report 2018, Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. Her research interests including teacher labor markets, politics of education reform and higher education, topics on which she has published in journals such as Education Finance and Policy, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature (Human Behavior) as well as World Bank regional flagships, such as Ready to Learn: Before School, In School and Beyond School in South Asia and Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific.
Prior to joining the World Bank, Tara worked as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, and before that, as a Manager in ICICI Bank in Mumbai, India. Tara holds a Ph.D. in the Economics of Education from Stanford University, and an M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and the Delhi School of Economics.