Editors

About the Editor

Tetsushi Sonobe is the Dean and CEO of the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), the Tokyo-based think tank of the Asian Development Bank that promotes the realization of a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific through policy research and capacity building.

Born in 1960 in Tokyo, Dean Sonobe obtained his PhD in economics from Yale University and BA in economics from the University of Tokyo. His research interests include the empirics of economic development, particularly industrial development processes and poverty reduction in developing countries.

Dean Sonobe has more than 20 years’ experience analyzing the role of human capital, institutions, and management in industrial development in Asia and other regions. Notably, he and prominent agricultural and development economist, Keijiro Otsuka, applied their unique enterprise survey approach to a series of development process case studies in different industries in East Asia. They expanded the scope of their industry study to cover South Asia, Africa, and Central America and conducted randomized controlled trials of management training programs for business owners and managers.

Before joining ADBI in April 2020, Dean Sonobe served for six years as a vice president of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo. He also previously served as a professor of economics at Tokyo Metropolitan University and GRIPS. Dean Sonobe is a recipient of the Nikkei Book Publication Prize and the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize, and a founding board member of the Japanese Association for Development Economics.