Robert H. Wade is a New Zealander, currently Professor of Global Political Economy at the London School of Economics.

He has previously worked at the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex), the World Bank, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University; now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs), the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Watson School of International and Public Affairs (Brown University). He has carried out fieldwork in the Pitcairn Islands, central Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan and Iceland. His research has focused on the Adam Smith question of the wealth of nations and on the economic governance of the global inter-state system. Subjects include the US informal empire; the World Bank, IMF, UNCTAD, and G20; the debates around industrial policy, financial crises and income inequality; and the morality of professional economics.

He is the author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988, 1994, 2007), and Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia’s Industrialization (1990, 2004). In 1992, Governing the Market won the American Political Science Association’s William H. Riker Book Award for best book in political economy. Robert was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2008.