Prof. Jonathan Ostry Joins Munk School

For many faculty members, summer is a quiet period for research, writing, travel or reflection. For others, it’s time to move to a new city and get to know a new student community. Prof. Jonathan Ostry is among the latter. In July, Prof. Ostry began his role as Professor of Economics, Global Affairs and Public Policy, cross-appointed to the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Economics.  

For Munk School students, learning from Prof. Ostry will mean gaining access to a globally reputed changemaker. Before his role as an educator (including most recently on the faculty of the department of economics at Georgetown University in Washington DC), he held senior roles for over three decades at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), including as Deputy Director for Research and Acting Director for the Asia-Pacific region.  

Ostry’s research has brought change to the policy arena in three key areas. First, his work on capital controls (restrictions on the movement of financial flows between nations) has helped to destigmatize regulations on cross-border capital movements and thereby foster global financial stability in line with the IMF’s mandate. Second, his research has raised awareness of the perils for economic growth of high levels of income inequality within nations: his findings have made redistributive policies (such as progressive income taxation and government transfer payments to low-income households) less of a taboo in policy circles, including at the IMF. And third, Ostry’s research on sovereign creditworthiness has influenced the way rating agencies assess public debt and the borrowing costs governments will face on their liabilities.   

While at U of T, Ostry plans to continue researching the consequences of fragmentation in the global economy, especially the influence of geopolitics on trade flows and economic prosperity. He is also interested in how populism—be it from the left or the right of the political spectrum—influences economic policy choices and the evolution of economic progress. Ostry’s research is likewise concerned with the political economy of economic reforms, and how to make such reforms less susceptible to electoral backlash. His findings suggest that paying attention to the distributional consequences of policies—including environmental policies—is essential to make such policies politically sustainable.  

Prof. Ostry’s arrival is also a personal homecoming for him to Canada. While Ostry spent the past four decades in the United States, he was born and grew up in Ottawa, where his parents were deputy ministers in the Pierre Trudeau governments of the 1970s. He graduated at the age of 18 from Queen’s University with a BA in economics and went on to do a second undergraduate degree at Oxford (in Philosophy, Politics and Economics). Graduate studies followed: an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. Prof. Ostry’s mother, Sylvia Ostry (1927-2020), was an iconic Canadian economist and public servant as well as a founding supporter of the Munk School.  

For the upcoming academic year, Prof. Ostry will teach a graduate and an undergraduate course on the theme of inequality and growth (GLA2069H and PPG410H1F). Both courses will explore the nexus between inequality and growth from a policy practitioner’s perspective. Questions to be investigated include what policy can do to initiate and sustain economic growth; the impact of growth-oriented policies on inequality; and the impact of inequality on the economic growth rate. The courses will position students to be fluent on the evidence that underpins economic policy making at the national and multilateral levels (including at agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank). Students will learn to think strategically about what the empirical evidence demonstrates, and how it can be used to give actionable policy advice in government tailored to country circumstances.  

All Munk School and Economics course descriptions can be found in the course calendar.