Nicoletta Batini

Nicoletta Batini (born April 15, 1970) is an Italian economist, notable as a scholar of innovative monetary and fiscal policy practices.

During the crisis she pioneered the IMF work exposing the dangers of excessive fiscal austerity and designed ways to consolidate public debt successfully during phases of financial deleveraging.

After earning her second Ph.D., she began her career at the Bank of England as an Economist from 1997 to 1999 in Monetary Policy Analysis.

In 2000, Batini was recruited by Professor Willem Buiter and Dame DeAnne Julius to become a Research Adviser of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and a founding member of the Monetary Policy Committee Unit.

Her innovative ideas and publications on monetary policy practices and strategies, were launched at prestigious international conferences of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, she acted as consultant for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the South African Reserve Bank, the Bank of Canada and the Czech National Bank, among others, for which she became External Member of the Research Committee in 2001 –a position she held for four consecutive terms until 2011.

In 2002 she was invited as Visiting Researcher by the Directorate Research of the European Central Bank.

Since 2003 at the International Monetary Fund, she has served as Advisor of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee between 2000-2003 and was Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey (2007-2012), and Director of the International Economics and Policy office of the Department of the Treasury of Italy’s Ministero dell’Economia e delle Finanze (MEF) between 2013-2015.

Batini's fields of expertise include monetary policy, public finance, open economy macroeconomics, labor economics, energy and environmental economics, and economic modeling.

She has handled extensive consultancy roles in the public sector in advanced and emerging market countries.

She holds a Ph.D. in international finance from the Scuola Superiore S. Anna and a Ph.D. in monetary economics from the University of Oxford.

Batini obtained a Laurea Degree in Economics and Business from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa with a thesis on the comparative analysis of the micro-economic impact of antitrust regulations on the international shipping of bulk goods, a M.Soc.Sc. from the University of Birmingham, a Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Oxford, and a second Ph.D., in International Finance, from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies.

She has been awarded important grants both from the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom, the University of Pisa, and Nemetria.

Her work during that time is cited by the ECB as one of those having influenced the bank’s decision to change monetary policy strategy in 2003.

In 2003 she went on to work as a Senior Economist with the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. where she conducted pioneering work on global imbalances, inflation targeting in emerging markets and the macroeconomic impact of the world’s demographic change, all of which had lasting effects on the Fund’s policy approach towards advice and conditionality toward its members.

From 2004 until 2013, she held a succession of posts in the IMF, including Resident Representative in Peru between 2006 and 2008.

During these years she studied ways to boost export competitiveness and reform of the National System of Public Investment (SNIP) ro improve the provision of public services in health, education and road infrastructure and fight income inequality, and measures to render the regulation of public-private partnerships aimed at logistic and transport infrastructure more effective and sound.

She also co-authored with the Central Reserve Bank of Peru novel analysis on measures to foster de-dollarization through structural reforms.

Nicoletta Batini has published or co-published a total of 19 IMF articles between June 1, 2004 and February 27, 2019.

In 2007 she was appointed Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, a post she held until 2012.

In early 2008 she returned to Washington D.C. to work on Chile but was co-opted in late 2008 to work on Canada and the United States, which had just entered the global financial crisis leading advanced missions.

Her work focused intensely on the sustainability of U.S. public finances, the countercyclical impact of the state balanced-budget rules and the employment and domestic demand impact of NAFTAs’ automotive sector and bailouts with a focus on trends in international transport and logistics and the impact of swings in the USD/CAD bilateral onto the global automotive value chain.

As the crisis moved to Europe, she also moved to the European Department with assignments on countries in the Nord Range, and Israel, and worked actively within EUR’s Analytical Group in charge of studying macro prudential rules and supervision of European Global Systemic International Financial Institutions (SIFIs), notably Nordea and Danske Bank.

Batini was then made a member of the Editorial Board of the IMF’s prestigious Finance & Development magazine.

She has two (twin) children who are American-Italian citizens and were born in Washington D.C. in 2009.

Nicoletta Batini's academic activities and publications have focused on macroeconomic forecasting and monetary economics, according to the IMF.

Between 2011 and 2012 Batini was Alternate President of the IMF’s Staff Association Committee (SAC)—the Fund’s Trade Union.

She is interviewed repeatedly by the media for her seminal work –the first to forcefully challenge, and eventually steer the Fund’s orthodox view on austerity—on the dangers of excessive fiscal austerity and ways to consolidate public debt successfully through gradualism to shelters growth.

In 2013 she took leave from the IMF to become a Director of the Treasury Department of the Ministry of Economics and Finance (MEF) in Italy leading the office in charge of political and international economies.

Her portfolio included the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (particularly the OECD’s Working Party 3 and of the Economic Development Review Committee (ERDC)), the G-20 including dossier G7/G8, Bruegel (for which exercises the role of Sherpa to the Director General of the Treasury) and the Bellagio Group.

While in Rome, Batini taught analytic methods of early warning and macroeconomic risk management at the High School of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

She returned to the IMF in late 2015 where she is now Lead Evaluator of the Fund’s Independent Evaluation Office.

Her work on the macroeconomic links between private and public debt has featured prominently in the press after publication in the Fund’s Fiscal Monitor of October 2016.

Batini is currently researching economic policy reforms to make the agri-food sector

sustainable.

She suggests making a paradigm shift towards a more sustainable system to achieve macroeconomic gains, such as carbon emission reductions, better public health, and more farm industry jobs.

Her new book “The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for People and the Planet” is forthcoming in early 2021.

She has worked on several real-world applications of these proposals, for example in the case of Denmark and France

While at Oxford, Batini was an active member of the Oxford Civil Liberties Society, and remains today an active member of St. Antony’s College Alumni and of the Ex-Allievi della Scuola S. Anna.

She has been a Key Volunteer for 'Catholic Agency for Overseas Development' CAFOD.

A polyglot, she has travelled expensively.