Xinshen Diao

Xinshen Diao is Deputy Division Director in the Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, and has also served as a Senior Research Fellow and a subtheme leader for CGIAR’s Research Program on Policy, Institutions, and Markets. She has extensive experience in managing large research programs and undertaking research on economic development and growth, intersectoral linkages, regional integration and dynamics, agricultural policies, and institutional changes. She has more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed economic journals, IFPRI books and monographs, and external book chapters.

In recent years, Xinshen has focused on growth and poverty reduction analysis in Africa both at the country level in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia and at the regional level including East Africa, West, Central, and Southern Africa. She is the leading editor of an IFPRI book titled Strategies and Priorities for African Agriculture: Economywide Perspectives from Country Studies. This book was written as an outcome of IFPRI’s technical support to Africa’s CAADP process and has strongly influenced the scale-up of public agricultural investment, particularly in African countries’ staple food sectors. Before coming to IFPRI, Xinshen was an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, stationed at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and Division Director and Assistant Director General of the Economic Reform Institute of China in Beijing in the late 1980s.

Xinshen received the University of Minnesota’s 2018 Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals, which recognizes the critical role her outstanding achievements and scholarly work have played in improving the lives of the world’s most underprivileged people. Xinshen also won the 2018 Outstanding Alumni Award from the Department of Applied Economics of the University of Minnesota for her achievements and the impact of her scholarly work throughout her career. Xinshen earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Economics from the Beijing Institute of Economics and her PhD in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota.