Nick Lea is a Fellow of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government. He works with the Economic Policy Network to provide advice to developing country policymakers on growth and development.

Nick was Deputy Chief Economist at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for International Development (DFID). He has worked on over thirty developing economies and has written extensively on developing country growth, macro-stabilisation, poverty, fragility and geo-economics. He led the development of FCDO’s country diagnostics, and developed their models 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 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.