Washington, July 22: Gita Gopinath, the second-ranking official at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), will step down at the end of August to return to Harvard University as a professor of economics, the IMF said on Monday.
Gopinath, who joined the IMF in 2019 as its first female chief economist and was promoted to first deputy managing director in January 2022, played a central role in guiding the Fund’s economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other global shocks, including the war in Ukraine.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Gopinath’s successor would be named “in due course.” The departure, which appears to have been initiated by Gopinath herself, surprised some IMF insiders.
“Gita steered the Fund’s analytical and policy work with clarity, striving for the highest standards of rigorous analysis at a complex time of high uncertainty and a rapidly changing global economic environment,” Georgieva said in a statement.
The Indian-born U.S. citizen oversaw multilateral surveillance and led research on fiscal and monetary policy, debt, and international trade. She was widely seen as an intellectual force within the IMF.
Her resignation also gives the U.S. Treasury – which holds the largest voting share in the IMF – an opportunity to recommend a replacement for the influential role. While European countries traditionally name the IMF’s managing director, the U.S. typically selects the first deputy managing director.
No comment was immediately available from the U.S. Treasury Department. Gopinath is set to return to Harvard, which she left in 2019 to join the IMF. Her return comes at a time when the Trump administration has been at odds with the university over its governance and admissions policies.
“I now return to my roots in academia, where I look forward to continuing to push the research frontier in international finance and macroeconomics to address global challenges, and to training the next generation of economists,” Gopinath said.
Her departure comes as U.S. President Donald Trump pushes to restructure the global economy and narrow the U.S. trade deficit through sweeping tariffs on imports from most countries.
