Anne Osborn Krueger

Anne Osborn Krueger (; born February 12, 1934) is an American economist. She was the World Bank Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2001 to 2006. She is currently the senior research professor of international economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Early life Krueger was born on February 12, 1934, in Endicott, New York. She was one of eight siblings born to Australian parents who had moved to the United States; her father was a physician. Her uncles included Australian government minister Sir Reginald Wright and physiologist Sir Douglas Wright.

Krueger initially planned to pursue pre-law and attend law school, but during her undergraduate years she came to the crucial realization that “one had to understand economics in order to understand law and politics”. This very insight prompted her to declare economics as her major in her senior year. She received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College in 1953. She received her Masters and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1956 and 1958 respectively.

Professional career As an economist, Krueger is known in macroeconomics and trade, famously popularising the term rent-seeking in a 1974 article. Furthermore, she has frequently criticised the U.S. sugar subsidies. She has published extensively on policy reform in developing countries, the role of multilateral institutions in the international economy, and the political economy of trade policy. In her 1996 Presidential address to the American Economic Association, she explored the lack of congruence between successful trade and development policies enacted worldwide and prevailing academic views.

She first started teaching at the University of Wisconsin as a teaching assistant in 1955 and then became an economics professor in 1958. She taught economics at the University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1982 before serving as World Bank Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986 where she was the Vice President of Economics and Research.

After leaving the Bank, she taught at Duke University from 1987 to 1993, when she joined the faculty of Stanford University as Herald L. and Caroline L. Ritch Professor in Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics. and a senior research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is the recipient of a number of economic prizes and awards. Throughout the 1990s there was a general consensus that open trade was anything but static and the benefits were largely “dynamic” (p51 This idea reinforces Krueger's empirical findings, further emphasizing the idea that government-created restrictions concentrate wealth among politically connected elites while imposing substantial indirect costs on society.

Contemporary debates about tech monopolies, pharmaceutical patents, occupational licensing, and financial sector rents all reflect Krueger's core insight: institutional design determines whether economic activity creates or extracts value. Her pioneering attempt to quantify rent-seeking inspired subsequent research on lobbying expenditures, corporate markups, and regulatory capture, though we still lack the comprehensive rent-extraction-to-GDP ratio she seems to have envisioned. Her work fundamentally transformed how economists understand the relationship between political institutions and economic development, providing the foundations for modern institutional and development economics.

Editorship Reforming India's Economic, Financial and Fiscal Policies (2003, with Sajjid Z. Chinoy). Latin American Macroeconomic Reform: The Second Stage (2003, with Jose Antonio Gonzales, Vittorio Corbo, and Aaron Tornell). Economic Policy Reform and the Indian Economy (2003). A New Approach to Sovereign Debt Restructuring (2002). Economic Policy Reform: The Second Stage (2000). The WTO as an International Organization (2000).