2014: Santiago Levy
Our first recipient was Santiago Levy. As one of the fathers of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT), Santiago played a crucially important role in the development of one of the leading antipoverty programs in the world. He introduced and oversaw the implementation of PROGRESA (later renamed Oportunidades) when he was Deputy Finance Minister of Mexico. Since then, CCT programs have spread to dozens of countries around the world, including Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Jamaica, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh, Morocco, Peru, and Cambodia.
Santiago is a BU Economics alum several times over: he’s received a BA (1976), MA (1978), and PhD (1980). He was also a faculty member in the department from 1983 to 1993 and was the first Director of our Institute for Economic Development (1989–1990). He is currently a vice president at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.