Wayne Thirsk
Distinguished Visiting Professor
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Wayne Thirsk has been a visiting reserch professor with the International Studies Program from July 2006. Wayne Thirsk is a public finance economist with extensive practical and academic experience; Thirsk has worked in 23 developing countries on a wide variety of public finance issues. His areas of expertise include tax policy reform, budget process reform and the reform of intergovernmental fiscal relationships. He earned his doctorate from Yale University in 1972.

Prior to his stay with the Andrew Young School, Dr. Thirsk was a tax policy advisor to the Zambia Ministry of Finance. From 1996-2002, Wayne worked as an intergovernmental fiscal advisor with the USAID fiscal reform project in Ukraine. In that capacity he worked closely with officials of the Department of Finance and members of the Ukrainian Parliament to draft legislation for a new Budget Code. In 1996, Thirsk spent a year in Egypt working as the director of the USAID funded corporate tax reform project and produced a blueprint for needed reform in this area. Prior to coming to this, Dr. Thirsk worked as the chief of party for the USAID fiscal reform project in the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan. In this position he successfully supervised the activities of four expatriate policy advisors and a local staff of five assistants and established a close and effective working relationship with budgetary officials in the Ministry of Finance and tax officers working in the State Tax Administration.

Before engaging in long term technical assistance activities, Dr. Thirsk was professor of economics at the University of Waterloo in Canada for seventeen years. During this period of his career Dr. Thirsk published numerous articles on a large range of public finance topics and engaged in several short-term consulting activities. Beginning in the early 1990s Dr. Thirsk was a member of World Bank missions to India, Papua New Guinea and Lebanon.