Biography | Kristalina Georgieva — A Research Year on Houghton Street

By the late 1980s almost no Bulgarian economist had a year of formal work in a Western department.

Georgieva spent 1987 and 1988 as a research fellow in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics, on Houghton Street.

Her European Parliament curriculum vitae lists the post by those exact years.

Later biographical notices, including a BBC profile at her IMF appointment, add that she came on a British Council scholarship.

LSE was not a degree factory for her. She already held the Sofia doctorate.

The year was a research placement in the same field as the 1986 thesis on United States environmental policy and growth.

Houghton Street is a short stub off Aldwych, not a campus lawn.

The Old Building, the library, and the surrounding courts are what a visitor still walks.

She was one of the first Bulgarian economists to study in the West before the Berlin Wall came down.

That sentence is worth keeping precise: study, not exile, and before 1989, not after.

She went back to Sofia to teach. The London year did not end the UNWE appointment.

It sat inside it.

Four years later the World Bank hired an environmental economist.

The skill the Fund and the Bank later used was assembled in two rooms: a Sofia lecture hall and this street.

Photo: Shadowssettle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Friends of Europe, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.