Dr. Eleni Panagiotarea

Dr. Eleni Panagiotarea is Greece’s Representative to the World Bank and the first woman to hold this role. Working with a team of highly driven and talented individuals, her areas of responsibility include the business environment, climate finance, the JET (jobs and economic transformation) agenda, and financial inclusion. She has extensive experience as a senior economist in the Greek finance sector, having advised top management on Greece’s macroeconomic performance and the country’s three adjustment programs, European Central Bank policies, and the reform framework for non-performing loans. For the latter, she contributed to the seminal volume, “Economic Crisis and Structural Reforms in Southern Europe: Policy Lessons” (Routledge). Distilling Greece’s experience of the sovereign debt crisis, she is the author of “Greece in the Euro: Economic Delinquency or System Failure?” (ECPR Press). She has commented extensively on Greek financial stability in major media outlets, including Bloomberg, CNBC, NPR, BBC World, BBC news, Al-Jazeera English, while her policy insights have appeared in international publications, including the Council on Foreign Relations and S&P Global Market Intelligence. To showcase her work, bridging the gap between institutional capacity and financial development, she has given research lectures in, indicatively, the London School of Economics Hellenic Observatory, the University of Oxford European Studies Centre, the Villa Mondragone International Economic Seminar, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States/Compagnia di San Paolo on Europe’s South.

A Research Fellow of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, she was National Rapporteur for three EU flagship programs, the ‘New Pact for Europe’ (launched by the King Baudouin Foundation), ‘Mercator European Dialogue’ (a project by the German Marshall Fund of the United States), and ‘Contested Legitimacy in Europe’ (part of Chatham House, Europe Programme). She has set up the ψ at the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, to promote the policy development of tools to strengthen financial access for households and SMEs. She is an Ambassador for Women Act, empowering women in leadership. She holds an M.Phil in Politics and a D.Phil in Political Economy (thesis title: ‘Economic and Monetary Union and National Economic Policy: The Case of Greece’) both from the University of Oxford and is an Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholar.