Olivier Blanchard

Olivier Jean Blanchard (French: [blɑ̃ʃaʁ]; born December 27, 1948) is a French economist, professor and Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, from September 1, 2008 to October 2015. He was appointed to this position under the tenure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He is also the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics at MIT. At the IMF, he was succeeded by Maurice Obstfeld.

Blanchard is one of the most cited economists in the world, according to IDEAS/RePEc.

Blanchard graduated from ESCP Europe in 1973 and also earned a first degree at Paris Dauphine University. He obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1977. He taught at Harvard University between 1977 and 1983, after which time he returned to MIT as a professor. Between 1998 and 2003 Blanchard served as the Chairman of the Economics Department at MIT. He has also been an adviser for the Federal Reserve banks of Boston and New York.

Blanchard has published numerous research papers in the field of macroeconomics, as well as undergraduate and graduate macroeconomics textbooks.

In 1987, together with Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Blanchard demonstrated the importance of monopolistic competition for the aggregate demand multiplier. Most New Keynesian macroeconomic models now assume monopolistic competition for the reasons outlined by them.

He is a fellow and past Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current position of service at the International Monetary Fund is as Economic Counsellor and director of Research.

During Blanchard's tenure as Chief Economist he reshaped IMF policies. During the Great Recession Blanchard supported global fiscal stimulus. During its slow recovery he urged a cautious removal of stimulus and advocated quantitative easing.

Austerity v. Stimulus debate

By 2010, following the financial crisis, many countries ran significant budget deficits. There was a global turn to austerity as economists encouraged governments to cut spending and raise taxes to avoid becoming another Greece. In June 2010 Blanchard and Carlo Cottarelli, the director of the IMF's fiscal affairs department co-authored an IMF blog post entitled "Ten Commandments for Fiscal Adjustment in Advanced Economies."

By 2011 Paul Krugman noted that Blanchard was already "suggesting that harsh austerity programs may be literally self-defeating, hurting the economy so much that they worsen fiscal prospects." By 2012 every country that had introduced "significant austerity" suffered economically. Blanchard issued "what amounted to a mea culpa." According to Paul Krugman, "the IMF now believes that it massively understated the damage that spending cuts inflict on a weak economy."

Inequality

Under Blanchard's tenure at IMF, Jonathan D. Ostry and Andy Berg published their findings that "inequality was detrimental to sustained growth." By April 2014 in the World Economic Outlook Blanchard situated inequality as a "central issue" for "macroeconomic developments."

" as the effects of the financial crisis slowly diminish, another trend may come to dominate the scene, namely rising inequality. Though inequality has always been perceived to be a central issue, until recently it was not seen as having major implications for macroeconomic developments. This belief is increasingly called into question. How inequality affects both the macroeconomy, and the design of macroeconomic policy, will likely be increasingly important items on our agenda for a long time to come."

— Olivier Blanchard World Economic Outlook April 2014