Nick Lea

Nick Lea works with the Economic Policy Network to provide advice to developing country policymakers on growth and development. He was Deputy Chief Economist at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Department For International Development (DFID).  He has written extensively on economic growth, poverty, macroeconomic crises, fragility, and worked on over thirty countries. He led the development of FCDO’s country diagnostics and allocation model used to prioritize how UK aid is spent. Before working for HMG, Nick was Country Head for the Children’s Investment Fund in Malawi; consulted for the World Bank; and spent ten years working in capital markets. He has a first-class degree in Mathematics from Oxford and specialised in Latin American economics for his MPhil. He holds a patent in the risk management of financial derivatives.