Peter Lanjouw

Peter Lanjouw

  • Senior Fellow

Peter Lanjouw (PhD) is professor in development economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on the analysis of poverty and inequality as well as on rural development, notably the study of a village economy in rural India and the broader analysis of rural non-farm diversification. He is currently editor of the World Bank Research Observer and a fellow of the Tinbergen Institute and a core member of the Global Poverty Commission, convened by the World Bank.

Alongside his academic appointment at the Vrije Universiteit, he also holds a part-time position as Director of the LIS Cross National Data Center in Luxembourg.  LIS collects and harmonizes socio-economic micro datasets from a large set of countries – currently still largely upper and middle-income countries, but with an increasing focus also on developing countries.  The LIS data can be freely accessed and analyzed by students and researchers for scholarly purposes.

Prior to moving to the Netherlands in 2015, he had spent more than two decades in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, most recently as Manager of the Poverty and Inequality team. He has taught courses at the Delhi School of Economics, the Foundation for the Advanced Study of International Development, Tokyo, and the University of Namur, Belgium, and has held a visiting position at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was an assistant editor of the World Bank Economic Review.  He holds an MSc and PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.