Lea Economics
Policy advice for economic growth and development
Nick Lea
Nick was the Deputy Chief Economist at the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) between 2015-2023, and was Acting Chief Economist in 2021. He has worked on over thirty developing economies and has written over sixty papers on developing country growth, macro-stabilization, poverty, fragility and geo-economics. He has provided advice to top-level economic policy-makers in around twenty countries. He led the development of the FCDO’s framework for country diagnostics, and developed their models both to allocate bilateral aid, and to forecast future global poverty.
Before working for the UK government, Nick was Country Head for the Children’s Investment Fund in Malawi; consulted for the World Bank; and spent ten years working in computational finance. He led the development of Adaptiv Analytics, a risk management engine enabling investment banks to monitor their long-term derivative risks, and is the co-inventor of its patented real-time methodology. He holds a first-class degree in Mathematics from the University of Oxford and specialised in the economics of Latin America for his MPhil (Oxon).
Nick has lectured at Oxford, Cambridge, the Royal College of Defence Studies, Peking University, and the American University of Afghanistan.
Please email info@lea-economics.org to discuss consultancy, teaching or research collaboration.
SELECTED PAPERS
Nothing is fixed until exports are fixed
November 2023 – This paper argues that policymakers and development partners have neglected foreign exchange as a constraint to growth in Africa, and that the current crises of low growth, slow poverty reduction and debt all have their roots in low export growth.*
February 2023 – Since becoming a new nation in 2011, the story of South Sudan is a tragedy mitigated by small gains – but unless the international community builds on those gains, the tragedy will continue for generations.
July 2022 – Egypt’s geography, dynamism, population, and solar resource give it huge economic potential. Over the last forty years, it has narrowed the income gap with industrialized economies, proved relatively robust under numerous shocks, and eased extreme poverty through a web of subsidy policies. Yet, its growth model has two deep flaws.*
April 2022 – Guyana has recently discovered the second largest per-capita oil reserve in the world. The relatively strong history of economic management, and current economic strategy gives grounds for cautious optimism that oil revenues might be spent relatively well.*
September 2017 – Despite volatile politics and an under-delivering state, Bangladesh is emerging as an unlikely Asian tiger. The country’s history of famine, floods, corruption, military coups, general strikes and political violence has perpetuated an understandable pessimism about its development. Yet this pessimism (like Kissinger’s ‘basket case’ characterization) does not quite fit the facts.
April 2017 – This paper argues that no sustained fast growth in developing countries is possible without sustained fast tradable growth, and that tradable growth is subject to particular barriers commonly overlooked by economic theory. A shorter version is also published on VoxDev.*
Nigeria: the curse of medium oil
March 2016 – Nigeria's oil output is just sufficient to transport the economy to middle income and inhibit the development of other growth drivers, but insufficient to propel it much further.*
Constraints to Growth in Malawi
2009 – World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 5097. Growth in Malawi has been primarily driven by the domestic multiplier effect from export revenues. This effect is particularly pronounced due to the high number of smallholder farmers, which produce Malawi s main export crop, tobacco which consequently results in the widespread and rapid transmission of agricultural export income.*
For consultancy on developing country economics, research collaboration, lectures or computational finance, please email info@lea-economics.org to help me understand whether I can help.