Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) in Dhaka, where he previously served as the organisation’s first Executive Director. He is also a member of the CPD Board of Trustees.
Appointed by the Interim Government of Bangladesh, Dr Bhattacharya led the committee that prepared the White Paper on the State of Bangladesh’s Economy – Dissection of a Development Narrative (November 2024).
He is the former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations Offices in Geneva and Vienna, and has served as Special Advisor on LDCs to the Secretary-General of UNCTAD, President of its governing board, and Coordinator of the LDC Group in the UN system. He currently convenes the Citizen’s Platform for SDGs, Bangladesh, a network of over 150 civil society and private sector organisations.
Dr Bhattacharya is a member of the United Nations Committee for Development Policy (CDP), a subsidiary body of ECOSOC, and serves on the Supervisory Board of BRAC International, which operates across Africa and Asia. He has been a member of several policy and advisory committees of the Government of Bangladesh, including those on macroeconomic policy, banking sector reform, gas resource utilisation, and foreign aid management.
He previously served as Senior Research Fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) and General Secretary of the Bangladesh Economic Association for three consecutive terms. He has also held visiting positions at universities in the USA and Europe and undertaken numerous international research and consultancy assignments.
Dr Bhattacharya is also the founding Chair of Southern Voice, a global network of more than 50 think tanks, and the founding Chair of LDC Monitor. A regular commentator in national and international media, he is recognised for his thought leadership on development, trade, and LDC issues.
He holds a PhD and Master’s in Economics from the Plekhanov Institute of National Economics, Moscow, and completed post-doctoral research at Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. He was also a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC.
His books published by Routledge include Southern Perspectives on the Post-2015 International Development Agenda (2016), Bangladesh’s Graduation from the Least Developed Countries Group – Pitfalls and Promises (2018), COVID-19 and Bangladesh: Inclusion, Disaggregation and Transition (2024), and Effective Development Cooperation: New Evidence from the Global South (forthcoming)
