Trade Facilitation along Belt and Road Initiative

Simeon Djankov was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Bulgaria from 2009 to 2013. In this capacity, he represented his country at the Ecofin meetings of finance ministers in Brussels. Prior to his cabinet appointment, Djankov was chief economist of the finance and private sector vice presidency of the World Bank. In his 14 years at the Bank, he worked on regional trade agreements in North Africa, enterprise restructuring and privatization in transition economies, corporate governance in East Asia, and regulatory reforms around the world.

He is the founder of the World Bank's Doing Business project. He is author of Inside the Euro Crisis: An Eyewitness Account (2014) and coeditor of The Great Rebirth: "Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism (2014)".

From 2013 to 2015 Dr Djankov served as Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow. Djankov was an associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics from 2004 to 2009 and the chairman of the Board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 2012–2013. He is also a member of the Knowledge and Advisory Council at the World Bank. He has published over 70 articles in professional journals.

He obtained his doctorate in economics in 1997 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.