IMF's No. 2 official, Gopinath, leaving at end-August to return to Harvard

Washington: Gita Gopinath, the No. 2 official at the International Monetary Fund, will leave her post at the end of August to return to Harvard University, the IMF said in a statement on Monday.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva will name a successor to Gopinath in "due course," the IMF said.

Gopinath joined the fund in 2019 as chief economist - the first woman to serve in that role - and was promoted to first deputy managing director in January 2022.

No comment was immediately available from the U.S. Treasury, which manages the dominant U.S. shareholding in the IMF. While European countries have traditionally chosen the Fund's managing director, the U.S. Treasury has traditionally recommended candidates for the first deputy managing director role.

Gopinath is an Indian-born U.S. citizen.

The timing of the move caught some IMF insiders by surprise, and appears to have been initiated by Gopinath.

Gopinath, who had left Harvard to join the IMF, will return to the university as a professor of economics.

Gopinath's departure will offer Treasury a chance to recommend a successor at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to restructure the global economy and end longstanding U.S. trade deficits with high tariffs on imports from nearly all countries.

She will return to a university that has been in the Trump administration's crosshairs after it rejected demands to change its governance, hiring, and admissions practices. Georgieva said Gopinath joined the IMF as a highly respected academic and proved to be an "exceptional intellectual leader" during her time, which included the pandemic and global shocks caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"Gita steered the Fund’s analytical and policy work with clarity, striving for the highest standards of rigorous analysis at a complex time of high uncertainty and rapidly changing global economic environment," Georgieva said.

Gopinath has also overseen the fund's multilateral surveillance and analytical work on fiscal and monetary policy, debt, and international trade.

Gopinath said she was grateful for a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to work at the IMF, thanking both Georgieva and the previous IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, who appointed her as chief economist.

"I now return to my roots in academia, where I look forward to continuing to push the research frontier in international finance and macroeconomics to address global challenges, and to training the next generation of economists," she said in a statement.