Gustavo Arcia, Ph.D. is an economist with experience in education finance, school autonomy and accountability, and education policy reform. He has analyzed the links between education finance and policy reform, household poverty, financial equity, and the incidence of public expenditures in education for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, UNICEF, USAID, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in more than 25 countries in Latin America, East Asia, West Africa, and the Middle East. His work in the past few years includes the development of education indicators for sustainable development, the development of benchmarking instruments for school autonomy and accountability, and several SABER country studies for the World Bank. He is a co-author of the World Bank’s book Assessing Sector Performance & Inequality in Education, of the SABER Benchmark report on School Autonomy, and of numerous reports on financial analysis and accountability in education.
Before becoming a consultant, he was a Senior Economist at the Research Triangle Institute (RTI International) and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Policy at Duke University. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Missouri-Columbia, BS and MS degrees in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida, and an Agronomist degree from the Pan-American School of Agriculture at El Zamorano, Honduras.