Stephen Charles Smith is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. He was Chair of the Department of Economics from 2019 to 2025, has twice served as Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP), and organized and was first director of GW’s International Development Studies Program. Smith received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University and has been a Fulbright Research Scholar, a Jean Monnet Research Fellow, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings and UNICEF Senior Fellow at the Office of Research- Innocenti, among other fellowships.

Smith is the co-author of Economic Development with Michael Todaro, the most widely used development economics textbook in the world; the 14th Edition will be published this year. He is author of Ending Global Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), and co-editor with Jennifer Brinkerhoff and Hildy Teegen of NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). He is author or coauthor of over 50 professional journal articles and many other publications. 

Professor Smith has been a consultant for the World Bank, the International Labour Organization (ILO, Geneva), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER, Helsinki), among others. 

Stephen has been involved with BRAC in several ways for many years. For example, after visiting BRAC in 2003, he co-organized a partnership between the new BRAC University and GW, funded by the US State Department. Also stemming from that visit, he deployed BRAC and control group data to write with two coauthors the first published research on the then-new Targeting the Ultrapoor/ Graduation Program (in the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change). When BRAC USA was formed in 2007, he was a member of its Advisory Council. Later, Stephen led research on BRAC’s agriculture programs in Uganda funded by BASIS (a USAID research arm). Resulting publications included papers on program impact (in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics), and on the sustainability of impacts after conclusion (in the Review of Economics and Statistics); BRAC’s Munshi Sulaiman was a coauthor on both Uganda studies.

Stephen remembers BRAC's founder, the late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, saying that “the logic of BRAC programs is the creation of an enabling environment in which the poor can participate in their own development.” As BRAC builds enabling environments in which the poor participate in their own development, Stephen sees his role on the board as finding ways to enable BRAC to extend them.