Elina Ribakova

Elina Ribakova is an economist and expert on the Russian economy, US-Russia relations, and macro-financial matters. She is affiliated with Bruegel in Brussels, the Kyiv School of Economics in Kyiv, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC.

Biography

Ribakova holds a BSc in Economics and Business from the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga and an MSc in Economics from the University of Warwick, where she was the sole recipient in her year of the Shiv Nath Prize.

From 1999 to 2008, she worked at the International Monetary Fund, focusing on issues of financial stability, crisis resolution, fiscal policy in commodity-producing countries, and determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI). She then worked in financial sector firms in Moscow and London including Citigroup (2008-2013), Avantium Investment Management (2013-2014), Pioneer Investments (2014-2015), and Deutsche Bank (2016-2018).

She was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2015-2017), contributing to the Rethinking Global Finance and Global Migration initiatives, and at Bruegel from 2018. She has also been a Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow, holder of a Chevening Scholarship, and Open Society Foundations alumna.

Ribakova is a co-founder of Migration Matters, a video-based multidisciplinary resource on migration. She has lectured on international macroeconomics with finance applications at the Chicago Booth, Higher School of Economics, New Economic School, European University at Saint Petersburg, and Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.

From 2019 to 2023, she was the Deputy Chief Economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) in Washington DC. In 2023 she left the IIF to become Director of the International Affairs Program and Vice President for Foreign Policy at the Kyiv School of Economics, and also joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as nonresident senior fellow. She is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and frequently appears in media, providing expert topical analysis of economic developments in the EMEA region to a range of leading broadcast and print media outlets, including Bloomberg, Bloomberg TV, Reuters and Reuters TV, Vedomosti, and the Wall Street Journal.