Prior to joining the School of Global Policy and Strategy, Freund served as global director of Trade, Investment and Competitiveness at the World Bank. Freund also served as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. In addition, she worked as the chief economist for the Middle East and North Africa at the World Bank, after working for nearly a decade in the international trade unit of the research department. Freund began her career in the international finance division of the Federal Reserve Board and spent a year visiting the research department of the IMF. The author of “Rich People Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms,” Freund was co-director of the World Bank’s flagship World Development Report 2020 on Global Value Chains. She has also published many articles on the effects of regional trade agreements and edited a volume on “The WTO and Reciprocal Preferential Trading Agreements.”
Freund earned her PhD in Economics with Distinction from Columbia University in New York.
