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Cecilia Ugaz
Former Research Coordinator
Cecilia Ugaz is an economist who works on institutional development, poverty alleviation and fiscal/redistributive issues. She has extensive experience in designing and conducting capacity building initiatives (training for officials and parliamentarians from Eastern Europe and Central Asia), and managing research projects. The main focus of her research is private/public partnerships in social and infrastructure service provision. Cecilia has conducted research combining micro and macro/institutional analysis to assess the distributive and poverty impacts of privatisation, regulation (and the lack of it) of social and infrastructure services. She has also studied thoroughly the consequences of enterprise restructuring on the behaviour of the labour markets during the transition from centrally planned to market economies in Eastern and Central Europe with particular attention to Bulgaria, Hungary and Russia. She has served as consultant for the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs of the Swiss Federal Government (SECO), the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and the Ford Foundation.
Born in Lima. Cecilia Ugaz was educated in Peru and in France. Cecilia holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her Ph.D., dissertation was about the behaviour of private investment in developing countries with a thorough econometric analysis applied to Peru. She also holds a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies in Analyse et Politiques Economiques from the EHESS and the Ecole Nationale de Statistique et de l’Administration Economique (ENSAE), and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Universidad de Lima. Before joining UNRISD in 2003, she was a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, University of Sussex) in the U.K., and a Research Fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) in Helsinki. She is fluent in Spanish, English and French.
Recent Selected Publications:
Utility Privatisation and Regulation: Fair deal for consumers? Cecilia Ugaz and Catherine Waddams Price (Eds.). Edward Elgar 2003; “Consumer Participation and Pro-poor Regulation in Latin America” In Utility Privatisation and Regulation: Fair deal for consumers? C. Ugaz and C. Waddams Price (Eds.). Edward Elgar 2003; Social Provision in Low Income Countries: New Patterns and Emerging Trends. G. Mwabu, C. Ugaz and G. White (Eds.). Oxford University Press, 2001; “The Role of the State in the Provision of Social Services: Decentralisation and Regulation”. In New Patterns of Social Provision in Low Income Countries G. Mwabu et al (eds.). Oxford University Press 2001;Liberalisation of Utilities Markets and Children’s Rights to Basic Services: Some evidence from Latin America. Innocenti Research Centre – UNICEF Florence 2001; Regulation of Social Services in Developing Countries: What are the Issues at Stake? UNU/WIDER Working Paper 170. December 1999; "Best of Both Worlds? New Patterns of Social Provision in Low-Income Countries". In Insights Newsletter from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex. Number 27. September 1998; Decentralisation and the Provision and Financing of Social Services: Concepts and Issues. UNU/WIDER Working Paper 130. 1997; Analysis of the Behaviour of Private Investment in Developing Countries: The Case of Peru: (1950-1990). Ph.D. Thesis. 1996; "Hungary" in Unemployment and Restructuring in Eastern Europe and Russia, (with S. J. Commander et al). EDI Development Studies, World Bank 1995; Labour Market Evolutions in the Transition: Hungary (with S. Commander and J. Kollo), Policy Research Working Paper 1373, World Bank 1994.