World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence

Ufuk Akcigit served as the Co-Academic Lead for the World Development Report 2026 and is currently the Deputy Chief Economist and Director of Private Markets in the Development Economics Vice Presidency of the World Bank Group. Prior to that, he was the Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Growth Academy at the University of Chicago, where he is currently on sabbatical leave.

He is widely recognized for his research on economic growth, innovation, and firm dynamics, and he is regularly consulted by major international institutions on these topics. He served as the Lead Academic for the World Development Report 2024, which examined the middle-income trap. He is also a Lead Academic Advisor and Board Member of the World Bank’s Institute for Economic Development and a member of the IMF Managing Director’s Advisory Council on Entrepreneurship and Growth.

His contributions have been recognized with several major honors, including the Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science (2025), the Max Planck–Humboldt Research Award (2021), the Kiel Institute Global Economy Prize (2022), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Research Award (2015), among several others. He is also a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and an elected member of the Turkish Science Academy.

Akcigit’s research has appeared in leading journals, shaping current thinking on productivity, innovation policy, economic mobility, and cross-country growth. He earned his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. Before joining the University of Chicago, he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.

Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. She is the faculty director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB. Her research covers digitization, causal machine learning and artificial intelligence, marketplace design, and the design of complex experiments.

She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal. She was the 2023 President of the American Economic Association, and she served two years as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, where she was a lead economics author of the 2023 Merger Guidelines. She previously served as Microsoft Corporation’s first chief economist for five years.

Nicholas (Nick) Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor in Economics at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and the Co-Director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Bernácer Prize, the European Investment Bank Prize, the Frisch Medal, the Kauffman Medal, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London.

Joshua Blumenstock is a Chancellor’s Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Goldman School of Public Policy. He is the Co-Director of the Global Opportunity Lab and the Center for Effective Global Action. Blumenstock’s research combines methods from computer science and empirical economics, with a focus on how novel data and technology can better address the needs of very poor and vulnerable populations.

He has a PhD in Information Science and an MA in Economics from UC Berkeley, and bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Physics from Wesleyan University. He is a recipient of awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the Intel Faculty Early Career Honor, and the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service. His work appears in general-interest journals including Science, Nature, and PNAS, as well as prominent economics journals, such as the American Economic Review and Review of Economic Studies, and computer science conferences, including ICML, KDD, AAAI, WWW, and CHI.

Elwyn Davies is a Senior Economist at the World Bank, working on firm dynamics, productivity and innovation in a wide range of countries. Elwyn’s work focuses on constraints to firm growth and productivity as well as on questions related to structural and economic transformation, including the role of services in development. He is an author of the World Bank flagship report At Your Service? The Promise of Services-Led Development, part of the World Bank’s Productivity Project. He has published in Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, World Bank Research Observer, and Journal of African Economies, among other journals. He holds a DPhil (Ph.D.) and MPhil degree in Economics from the University of Oxford and BSc and BA degrees in Physics and Liberal Arts & Sciences from Utrecht University.

Indermit Gill is the former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and former Senior Vice President for Development Economics. Prior to that, Dr. Gill served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he helped shape the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program. Dr. Gill led the World Bank’s influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His work includes introducing the concept of the “middle-income trap” to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation. Indermit has published extensively on key policy issues facing developing countries—among other things, sovereign debt vulnerabilities, green growth and natural-resource wealth, labor markets, and poverty and inequality. Indermit has also taught at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Somik V. Lall is Director of Strategy in the Office of the World Bank Group Chief Economist. Lall has held various leadership positions across the World Bank Group including Senior Adviser to the World Bank Group Chief Economist, Acting Director of DEC Development Policy, Head of the Climate Economics Team, and Global Lead in the Sustainable Development and Infrastructure Vice Presidencies. Lall has also directed the World Bank's 2024 World Development Report on the “Middle Income Trap” that examines how middle-income countries can break into the ranks of the wealthiest economies. He is also a co-founder of the Growth Academy, a joint initiative between the World Bank and the University of Chicago to advance joint research programs on economic growth with think tanks in emerging economies.

As head of the climate economics and policy team in the World Bank’s Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions vice presidency, he developed and supervised policy research programs on resilience and economic development, the macro-criticality of climate change, and innovations for the low-carbon transition.

Lall has published extensively on key policy issues facing key emerging economies. Recent research includes assessment of business dynamism in Ukraine, the cost of keeping women out of productive jobs, the effectiveness of spatially targeted industrial policies, jobs potential of African cities, and identifying “differentiated” responsibilities for carbon emissions across countries. During the pandemic, he developed a novel data-driven approach to help city mayors rapidly respond to protect their citizens from the ravages of COVID 19. Listen to his Monocle podcast.

Lall also teaches at Johns Hopkins University and has been a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi. He has previously served as Senior Economic Counselor to the Government of India.

Gaurav Nayyar is the Director of the World Development Report 2026. Prior to that, he served as Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions Vice Presidency at the World Bank, which he joined as a Young Professional in 2013. Previously, he was an Economics Affairs Officer in the Economic Research Division of the World Trade Organization, where he co-led the World Trade Report 2013: Factors Shaping the Future of World Trade.

Gaurav’s research interests lie primarily in the areas of economic growth, structural transformation, trade, industrialization, and firm productivity, and he has published in a variety of academic journals on these issues. His latest book is At Your Service? The Promise of Services-Led Development.

Gaurav holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Dorothy Hodgkin Scholar. His other alma maters include the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Cambridge, and St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.

Andrew Ng is the Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Managing General Partner at AI Fund, Managing Partner at AI Aspire, Executive Chairman of LandingAI, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. As a pioneer in machine learning and online education, Dr. Ng has changed countless lives through his work in AI. More than 8 million people have taken an AI class from him.

He was the founding lead of the Google Brain team, which helped Google transform into a modern AI company. He served as Vice President and Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led a 1,300-person AI team responsible for the company’s AI technology and strategy. He was formerly Director of the Stanford AI Lab, home to more than 20 faculty members and research groups. In 2023, he was named to the TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.

He has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers in AI and related fields and holds a BSc from Carnegie Mellon University, an MSc from MIT, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Dr. Ng now focuses his time primarily on providing AI training and on his entrepreneurial ventures, looking for the best ways to accelerate responsible AI adoption globally.

Anja Sautmann is a Senior Economist in the World Bank's Development Research Group and the point person for DECRG's  AI and Digital Development (AI/DD) Research Initiative. Her research asks how individual behavior shapes optimal policy design, with a focus on demand for healthcare and public healthcare provision for children and mothers in West Africa. She has contributed to developing methods for measuring preferences and for selecting optimal policies faster and more accurately based on experimental evidence. Anja is working on several projects in healthcare and in the justice sector that try to understand how machine learning techniques and AI can support better development outcomes. Before joining the World Bank, Anja was an Assistant Professor at Brown University and the Director of Research, Education, and Training at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from New York University.

Christopher Tonetti is an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research is in the area of macroeconomics, with a focus on growth and household finance. Christopher received a BA in economics-mathematics from Columbia University and a PhD in economics from New York University.