Michael Woolcock

Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Scientist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group, where he has worked since 1998. For fourteen of these years he has also been a (part-time) Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, with periods of leave spent at the University of Cambridge (2002, as the Von Hugel Visiting Fellow) and the University of Manchester (2007-2009, as the founding research director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute). His research focuses on strategies for enhancing the effectiveness of policy implementation, extending work addressed in his recent book Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action (with Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett; Oxford University Press, 2017). He is also currently co-directing the World Bank’s bi-annual ‘Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020’. An Australian national, Michael is a co-recipient of the American Sociological Association’s awards for best book (2012) and best article (2014) on economic development. He has a PhD in comparative-historical sociology from Brown University.