These countries are home to three-quarters of the world’s population and account for more than 40 percent of global output. Yet many have stalled in the middle-income trap. Conventional economic theory predicts they should be converging with the world’s richest economies. Instead, progress has slowed, or reversed. This is the middle-income trap.
The Growth Academy exists because this gap is neither accidental nor inevitable. Closing it requires better evidence, better policy, and stronger connections between the two.
World Bank, World Development Report 2024: The Middle-Income Trap. Lead academic: Ufuk Akcigit, UChicago.
Real GDP per capita in constant 2015 US dollars, log scale. World Bank, World Development Indicators. Hover or drag across the chart to move through the years.
South Korea ends roughly seventeen times richer than Ghana, two countries that started side by side.
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policymakers, scholars, and senior government officials have attended the Growth Academy since 2024.
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countries have sent representatives, ranging from Algeria to Vietnam.
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faculty and speakers, including five Nobel laureates, the World Bank's Chief Economist, and other leading experts in economic growth.
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continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.
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World Development Reports the Growth Academy has contributed to: The Middle-Income Trap (2024) and AI for Development (2026).
Numbers from the cohorts so far. The list keeps growing.
Experts + Leadership
Taught by the economists defining the future of growth.
Co-directors
Professor Ufuk Akcigit of the University of Chicago, lead academic of the 2024 World Development Report, and Dr. Somik V. Lall of the World Bank, who directed it.
Recent faculty include Philippe Aghion, James Heckman, Lars Peter Hansen, Susan Athey, Penny Goldberg, Joel Mokyr, Michael Kremer, Josh Lerner, and Chang-Tai Hsieh, alongside the World Bank’s chief economists for every region.
An intensive program for those guiding economic policy and growth.
The Growth Academy brings together senior practitioners from economies seeking to sustain growth beyond the middle-income trap. Participants come from ministries of finance and planning, central banks, regulatory authorities, and World Bank country teams. Each cohort also includes a small number of advanced PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, creating a forum where frontier research and economic policymaking inform one another.
Participants share two defining characteristics: responsibility for shaping economic policy and the ability to put new evidence into practice. The Academy is designed for those who can engage with frontier research and apply it to the practical challenges of economic development.
Typical participants include:
Senior economists in ministries of finance and planning
Central bankers and macroprudential policymakers
World Bank country economists
Leaders of competition authorities, statistical offices, and innovation agencies
Advanced PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in economic growth, industrial organization, and development
The method
The World Development Report begins a conversation. The Growth Academy extends it.
Research changes policy most effectively when it is debated, questioned, and refined by the people responsible for putting it into practice. Each year, the Academy brings together the authors of the World Development Report with policymakers, central bankers, development economists, and other senior practitioners from the countries confronting the middle-income trap. Over two weeks of intensive discussion, participants test new evidence against institutional realities, challenge assumptions, and explore how frontier research can inform practical decision-making.
The Academy is designed as a cumulative process rather than a one-time event. Each cohort builds on the questions, insights, and experiences of those that came before it, creating an ongoing dialogue between researchers and policymakers. In turn, the conversations generated by the Academy enrich future cohorts and help shape the continuing evolution of the research itself.
The result is a continuous exchange between frontier economics and the practice of economic policy.
Growth Academy 2024 · World Bank Group, Washington
“We have to think about every economy like a human body. Whenever we have a problem in our body, we go to the doctor, and the doctor asks for a blood sample, runs the MRI, runs the X-rays. We have to do the same. You need to first collect reliable data, you need to know how to process the data with well-trained people, and then you need to come up with recommendations. Every country has its own problems, and you cannot look at somebody else’s blood sample and try to come up with the solution for anybody else’s headache.”
Ufuk Akcigit, on the Academy's method.
The format
One curriculum. Two world-class institutions.
The Chicago Summer Academy is the flagship program. Week one takes place at the University of Chicago and week two at World Bank Group headquarters in Washington. Regional editions condense the core curriculum into three- to five-day programs while incorporating research and policy discussions tailored to local priorities.
Week one
UChicago, Becker Friedman Institute
Faculty from the University of Chicago and leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, and Collège de France, introduce the latest evidence on economic growth. Participants form country teams and begin diagnosing their economies.
Week two
World Bank Group, Washington D.C.
Participants work with World Bank Chief Economists, Regional Vice Presidents, and the teams behind the World Development Report to translate evidence into practical strategies for growth.
Country teams
From diagnosis to strategy
Participants work throughout both weeks in multidisciplinary country teams. By the end of the second week, each team presents a research-based growth diagnosis and a policy strategy tailored to its economy, for immediate feedback and implementation.
Regional editions
Adapting the model
The Growth Academy does not end in Chicago. Regional editions carry its ideas into the places where growth policy is made, combining the core curriculum with research and discussion focused on the host region’s most pressing economic challenges. Past locations include Bucharest, Cairo, and Tokyo.
Scenes from past convenings in Chicago, Bucharest, and Cairo. The 2024 highlights film recaps the inaugural cohort at the Becker Friedman Institute and the World Bank Group in Washington.
In the Press
The Growth Academy is featured in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics Newsletter.
The Growth Academy is featured in the 2024 to 2025 Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics newsletter at the University of Chicago. Read it page-by-page, or open the full PDF.
The World Development Reports, read at the source.
The World Development Report is the World Bank’s flagship research series, shaping the global development agenda. Each report brings together leading economists to synthesize the latest evidence on the world’s most pressing development challenges. The Growth Academy provides participants with direct access to the ideas, and many of the economists, behind the reports. Browse the collection to explore each report’s overview.
