Surjit S. Bhalla is a former part-time member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council. In addition, he serves as Chairperson for the Ministry of Commerce High Level Advisory Group on Trade; Economic Adviser to the Fifteenth Finance Commission, Government of India. He is a regular Invitee to the Aspen Institute Program on World Economy, USA, 2002-present. He is also a Contributing Editor for Indian Express (since 2014). He was founder-chairman of Oxus Research & Investments 1997-2017.
Surjit has taught at the Delhi School of Economics and served as executive director of the Policy Group in New Delhi, the country’s first non-government funded think tank. Since 1999, he has been on the governing board of India’s largest think tank, NCAER.
He has worked as a research economist at the RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, and at both the research and treasury departments of the World Bank, and as a consultant to Warburg Pincus. He has also worked on Wall Street in Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.
He is the author of several academic articles as well as four books on globalization and its effects on the world economy. He is the author of Imagine There’s no Country (2002), Second Among Equals – The Middle Class Kingdoms of India and China (2007), Devaluing to Prosperity (2012), and most recently (2017) The New Wealth of Nations. His first book, Between the Wickets: The Who and Why of the Best in Cricket (1987), developed a model for evaluating performance in sports and was published in 1987.
His most recent book Citizen Raj: Indian Elections 1952-2019 analyzed Indian elections since 1952 and accurately forecast the Modi victory in 2019. Surjit is also a regular contributor (over 1300 articles) to Indian newspapers, magazines, and television on financial markets, economics, politics and cricket.
He holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton University, a Master in Public and International Affairs from Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and a BSEE degree from Purdue University. He lives in New Delhi.