Biography | Kristalina Georgieva — The Campus Where She Took a Doctorate in Economics

Most profiles of Kristalina Georgieva open in Washington. The training that put her there happened on this campus in Sofia's Studentski Grad. She was born in the city on 13 August 1953. Her father, Ivan Stefanov Georgiev, worked roads as a civil engineer. Her mother, Marinka Petrova Mihailova, kept a shop. She enrolled at what was then the Karl Marx Higher Institute of Economics, on 8-mi Dekemvri Street. In 1976 she took a master's in political economy and sociology. The institute was renamed the University of National and World Economy in 1990. The pin is the same campus. In 1986 she defended a doctorate in economic sciences here. The thesis title is recorded in her European Parliament curriculum vitae: Environmental Protection Policy and Economic Growth in the USA. That topic was unusual for a Bulgarian economist trained inside a planned system. It pointed her toward environmental economics years before the World Bank hired her for that work. She taught in the Department of Economics on this campus from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, first as an assistant, later as an associate professor. Her European Parliament CV runs the appointment to 1993. The Fund's 2019 selection release shortens the teaching years to 1991. In 1990 she published a Bulgarian-language microeconomics textbook. University and press accounts treat it as an early attempt to explain market prices in plain language after decades of central planning. The campus a visitor sees now is not the late-socialist complex she studied in. The main building has been rebuilt and enlarged. The institution is still the one that granted the doctorate. Stand at the Studentski Grad gates and the later titles fall away. Before the Fund, the Commission, and 1818 H Street, this is where the economist was made. Photo: Anarchazys, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Bank Group / Grant Ellis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.