Gita Gopinath

Gita Gopinath is a professor of economics at Harvard University and currently the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. She served as IMF Chief Economist from 2019 to 2022, overseeing the Fund's research and leading its economic analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent inflationary surge. Her academic research has focused on international finance, including the dominant currency paradigm — arguing that the dominance of the US dollar in trade invoicing has important implications for international monetary policy. She has also studied the macroeconomics of trade, capital flows, and emerging market crises. At the IMF, she was influential in shaping the Fund's COVID response recommendations to member countries. Gopinath's empirical work on the pricing of traded goods in dominant currencies has demonstrated how dollar appreciation tightens global financial conditions even for countries with flexible exchange rate regimes.