Vijayendra Rao is a development economist and interdisciplinary social scientist whose work examines how culture, power, and institutions shape human agency, inequality, and social change. His research bridges economics with anthropology, sociology, and political science, combining rigorous empirical analysis with deep qualitative and ethnographic engagement. His work has been published in leading journals in economics, political science, sociology, and development studies. After more than two decades as a Lead Economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group, he is now working as an independent scholar-practitioner, writer, and teacher. From March to June 2026, he will serve as the Roberta Buffett Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner in Residence at Northwestern University.
Dr. Rao’s work sits at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He has been centrally concerned with making social science more reflexive, context-sensitive, and grounded in lived experience, while retaining analytical rigor. His research spans gender, culture, political economy, democratic participation, and development practice, and draws on long-term engagement in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Jamaica.
His early research helped pioneer empirical approaches to topics that were then underexplored in economics, including domestic violence, dowries, public celebrations, sex work, price heterogeneity, and mixed-method impact evaluation. His edited volume Culture and Public Action (2004), co-edited with Michael Walton, played a formative role in bringing culture, aspirations, and inequality traps into mainstream development debates. Over time, his work has increasingly focused on collective action, democratic deliberation, and the conditions under which participation can transform power relations rather than merely legitimize them.
He is the co-author, with Ghazala Mansuri, of Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?, a widely cited synthesis of global evidence on participatory development, and, with Paromita Sanyal, of Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies, which combines ethnographic depth with institutional analysis. He has also written extensively on decentralization and the political economy of development.
As a practitioner, Dr. Rao has worked closely with governments, civil society organizations, and multilateral institutions to design, adapt, and evaluate large-scale development programs. From 2010 to 2020, he led the World Bank’s Social Observatory, an initiative that embedded researchers within implementation teams to support adaptive learning, rapid feedback, and context-sensitive policy design. This work reflects his broader commitment to practice-informed research and research-informed practice.
More recently, his research has turned to large-sample qualitative data and narrative analysis. He has been experimenting with artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze thousands of open-ended interviews, using these tools to study aspirations, identity, and well-being in ways that complement—and sometimes challenge—standard quantitative approaches.
Dr. Rao holds a BA in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the World Bank in 1999, he held academic appointments at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Williams College, and Brown University. He is a Fellow of the International Economic Association, Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging Program at CIFAR, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development.