Paul Brenton
Paul Brenton is Lead Economist (Trade and Regional Integration) in the Africa Region of the World Bank.
His role is to lead analytical work on regional and on Africa-wide trade issues and to support Bank staff in their work in these areas. Paul also coordinates the Africa Region's activities that are supported by the Multi-Donor Trust Fund for Trade and Development. Previously he worked in the Trade Department of the Bank where he worked for several years on issues related to trade policies and trade reform with a focus on regional integration and preferential trade agreements.
Paul has contributed to three aspects of the Bank's work on trade. First, he has supported country programs with a focus on mainstreaming trade into development strategies and on developing policies to improve competitiveness. Second, he has contributed to the Bank’s knowledge program on trade. He led a large project looking at the factors that undermine the survival of exporting firms in Africa; was a contributor to a recent project on export diversification that resulted in the book "Breaking into New Markets: Emerging Lessons for Export Diversification"; and was twice a member of the core team that prepared the Bank's flagship publication, Global Economic Prospects. He has also written and published widely on trade and regional integration. Finally, he has helped develop tools that support analysis of trade policy issues in the Bank and in client countries. In particular, he has overseen the development of the Bank’s Tariff Reform Impact Simulation Tool (TRIST), which is increasingly being disseminated in client countries and has recently been adopted by COMESA as a tool for member states to use in assessing the revenue impact of trade liberalization.
Paul joined the Bank in 2002, having been Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Trade Policy Unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Before that was a lecturer in economics at the University of Birmingham in the UK. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of East Anglia.