Rafael Romeu

Dr. Romeu joined DevTech from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where he worked since 2001. From 2010 on, he served in the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, as the fiscal economist assigned to Spain. In this capacity, he led discussions on structural fiscal policy issues arising during the European Financial Crisis and developed IMF recommendations for tax measures, structural fiscal adjustment packages, entitlement and pension reforms, fiscal councils, tax policy reforms, expenditure reviews, and fiscal federalism reforms for Spain’s autonomous communities. He led policy discussions with regional finance ministers, the central government, the European Commission, Eurostat, and the European Central Bank on regional transparency, sustainability and financing, as well as IMF joint engagement with OECD and UK authorities to assess Spain’s independent fiscal council.

Prior to the European Financial Crisis, Dr. Romeu worked on a number of other IMF country assignments providing fiscal policy guidance for financial support to low-income countries, extending financial support to middle-income countries implementing structural reforms, as well as carrying out IMF macro-fiscal surveillance. He has worked in Armenia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Panama, and Cuba, among others. In addition to direct work on country assignments, he carried out IMF multilateral surveillance and research in the Research Department, the International Capital Markets Department, and the Western Hemisphere Department Regional Surveillance unit.

Prior to joining the IMF, Dr. Romeu held positions at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the Central Bank of Venezuela. He has been consulted by the US Department of State and the US Department of the Treasury on economic issues relating to Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2007, he taught financial theory as a visiting lecturer at the Department of Economics at Yale University (on leave from IMF), and from 2010-12 he was president of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

Dr. Romeu’s research has focused on fiscal policy sustainability, economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean and financial market microstructure. Dr. Romeu co-led the development of the IMF’s flagship Historical Public Finances in Modern History project, which documented two hundred years of the history of budget deficits and government debts over the period 1800-2011. He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and several chapters in books. In 2001, he published two books on the emergence of retail equity trading platforms with direct access to information on the Nasdaq order book. Dr. Romeu is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.