Dr Duvvuri Subbarao is an Indian Economist and Central Banker. He was the Governor of Reserve Bank of India 2008-13 and is currently a distinguished visiting faculty at the National University of Singapore. As Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Subbarao is generally credited as having safely stewarded Indian... Read more
Dr Duvvuri Subbarao is an Indian Economist and Central Banker. He was the Governor of Reserve Bank of India 2008-13 and is currently a distinguished visiting faculty at the National University of Singapore.
As Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Subbarao is generally credited as having safely stewarded Indian economy through the financial crisis. He also undertook initiatives to demystify the Central Bank, including lucid presentation of macro economic concepts in RBI publications and grassroots level interaction with the masses through various financial inclusion, financial literacy and village outreach programmes.
In February 2012, Subbarao presented his world famous theory on the New Trilemma of Central Bankers, which he named as the “Holy Trinity” of price stability, financial stability and sovereign debt sustainability. This countered Mundell’s well known “Impossible Trinity” of fixed exchange rates, free capital flows and independent monetary policy.
Subbarao worked as the joint secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs and Ministry of Finance 1988-93. Subsequently he became the Finance Secretary to the Government of Andhra Pradesh between and on completion of his term, he became lead economist at the World Bank from until 2004.
He was then appointed to the Prime Ministers’ Economic Advisory Council from 2005 to 2007 before he was elevated as the Finance Secretary in 2007. Subbarao was involved in the initiation of fiscal reforms at state level and managed a flagship study on decentralisation across major countries of East Asia including China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines and Cambodia. He is credited with financial turnaround of Andhra Pradesh in the late nineties when the state had slipped into an unprecedented fiscal crisis.
Subbarao published his book, Who Moved My Interest Rate?: Leading the Reserve Bank of India Through Five Turbulent Years, was published in July 2016.