Hélène Poirson
Advisor
Hélène Poirson joined the IEO in January 2024, after serving as an Advisor in the Office of the Chief Economist of the IMF, where she led several surveillance reports, including the July 2023 G20 Surveillance Note, the October 2023 WEMD Board and WEO press conference, and high-level engagements at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank, such as the IMFC presentation and the ASEAN roundtable of finance ministers. Hélène was also responsible for steering various workstreams, such as Integrated Policy Framework (IPF) Metrics, Joint Finance Health Ministers Task Force, and gender. Her corporate service has extended to senior roles on the Fund’s generative AI coordination committee and Intranet Governance council.
Before working in the Office of the Chief Economist, Hélène was an Advisor in the Office of Risk Management (ORM) of the IMF, where she coordinated the work on the IMF’s first Enterprise Risk Management policy approved in December 2022. Prior to ORM, Hélène was the deputy division chief for macroeconomic policy in the Strategy Policy and Review (SPR) department of the IMF, where in addition to helping manage two of the largest SPR review divisions, she also led several operational and analytical departmental and cross-departmental projects during the COVID-19 crisis—including Board presentations on EM prospects and risks and distributional effects of UMP, a management surveillance meeting on the effects on EMs of higher Fed rates and stronger dollar; and four IMF working papers. Her research interests include macro-financial topics, debt and growth, and cross-border spillovers.
Helene attended Ecole Polytechnique and received her Ph.D. in Economics in 1998 from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She taught at ENSAE and worked in a think-tank in Paris before joining the IMF in 1999. She grew up in various countries on the African continent, including Madagascar, Mauritania, Somalia, Burundi, and Cote d’Ivoire.
