Names: Radelet from State to USAID

Steve Radelet, who joined the State Department last January to be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top advisor on development, is moving over to USAID to be their first  Chief Economist since the 1990s.

Radelet left his post as a senior fellow the Center for Global Development to help Clinton during the development of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which was unveiled earlier this month. While at State he co-led the QDDR task force on aid effectiveness and helped stand up the Feed the Future Initiative, a huge program that will be transferred to USAID as part of the QDDR implementation. The Chief Economist job at USAID is new.

"The new position of Chief Economist (CE) will help establish USAID as a global leader for innovative policy analysis, research, and implementation," read an internal USAID email about Radelet’s  move, obtained by The Cable. Radelet will be part of the senior management team and report director to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.

According to the email, the job will have four functions:

1. Building USAID’s capacity to conduct rigorous economic analysis, especially macroeconomic analysis,
2. Developing a network of leading economic researchers and development economists,
3. Cultivating a new generation of economists and research analysts at the Agency, and
4. Providing strategic and analytical support to USAID’s work in priority countries, and implementation of Presidential Initiatives and the Presidential Policy Directive. 

Before working at CGD, Radelet was a founding co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia from 2000 to 2002.