Homi Kharas Named One of FP.com’s Leading Global Thinkers of 2013

Senior Fellow Homi Kharas, deputy director of the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings, has been named one of ForeignPolicy.com’s leading global thinkers in 2013 for his research and leadership on eradicating extreme global poverty, and also designing the post-2015 agenda for the Millennium Development Goals.

Kharas is the lead author of the report of the UN’s High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (as well as executive secretary of the High Level Panel Secretariat), which stated that:

a new development agenda should carry forward the spirit of the Millennium Declaration and the best of the MDGs, with a practical focus on things like poverty, hunger, water, sanitation, education and healthcare. But to fulfil our vision of promoting sustainable development, we must go beyond the MDGs. They did not focus enough on reaching the very poorest and most excluded people. They were silent on the devastating effects of conflict and violence on development. The importance to development of good governance and institutions that guarantee the rule of law, free speech and open and accountable government was not included, nor the need for inclusive growth to provide jobs. Most seriously, the MDGs fell short by not integrating the economic, social, and environmental aspects of sustainable development as envisaged in the Millennium Declaration, and by not addressing the need to promote sustainable patterns of consumption and production. The result was that environment and development were never properly brought together. People were working hard – but often separately – on interlinked problems.

Kharas also is author of the recent policy brief “Reimagining the Role of the Private Sector in Development” and is a co-editor, with Laurence Chandy, Akio Hosono, and Johannes Linn, of Getting to Scale: How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People.

Previous editions of the poll have included other Brookings scholars, both former and current:

Kemal Derviş in 2005; Bob Kagan in 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2012; Bill Easterly in 2008 and 2009; Cass Sunstein in 2009; Peter W. Singer in 2009; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in 2011; Thomas Mann in 2012.