Wahiduddin Mahmud recently retired as Professor of Economics at Dhaka University and is Chairman of Economic Research Group, Dhaka. He is currently on the governing board of Global Development Network(GDN) and is chairman of its regional component, South Asia Network of Research Institutes(SANEI). He is also Senior Advisor of the Bangladesh programme of the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics. He has recently completed two terms as a member of the UN Committee for Development Policy (UN-CDP).
He has consulted for numerous international organizations and has held teaching and research appointments at, among other institutions, Cambridge University, Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, UNDP, International Food Policy Research Institute and the World Bank. He was a member of the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh in 1996 in charge of the Ministry of Finance and Planning.
He chaired the Panel of Economists for the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Five-Year Plans of Bangladesh and also chaired the government committee for monitoring the implementation of MDGs. He served on the Board of Directors of Bangladesh Bank for one and a half decade (1993 to 2009) and led two successive banking reform committees of the government.
He served on the Governing Body of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council (BARC) and as a syndicate member of BUET and has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies since 1996. As chairman of the technical committee of national income estimation of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, he oversaw the revisions of the national income accounts of Bangladesh in 2001 and 2013. He was a co-founder and chairman of PKSF (19972009), the apex organization for funding the micro-credit programmes of NGOs in Bangladesh.
He is also founder chairman of Institute of Microfinance, a sister organization of PKSF. He has published on a wide range of topics in development economics and is on the editorial advisory committees of several international academic journals.
The idea of Bangladesh representing a case of “development surprise” has been introduced to the academic community through his research work, including the recently published paper in the journal World Development(Elsevier) entitled “Paths to development: is there a Bangladesh surprise?” His recent books include Adjustment and Beyond: the Reform Experience in South Asia(UK: PalgraveMacmillan), Handbook on the South Asian Economies(UK: Edward Elgar), Seasonality of Hunger and Public Policies (World Bank publications), Adjustment to Global Economic Volatility: The case of SouthAsia(New Delhi: Academic Foundation), andThe Theory and Practice of Microcredit (UK: Routledge, 2016, forthcoming).