Ruth Vargas Hill

Ruth Hill is the Director of the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit in the Food and Nutrition Policy Department. She was previously a Lead Economist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank, where she spent a decade leading work on the distributional impacts of climate change, fiscal policy, markets, and institutions. She also led the development of the World Bank’s Rural Income Diagnostics and conducted Poverty Assessments and Systematic Country Diagnostics in East Africa and South Asia. From 2019 to 2021, she was on external service as the Chief Economist at the UK government’s Centre for Disaster Protection. Before joining the World Bank in 2013, Ruth was a Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI, conducting impact evaluations on insurance and market interventions. She has published in the Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Experimental Economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and World Development. She holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford.