Short bio
Richard Samans is an internationally-recognized expert on strengthening the growth and development prospects of economies through fundamental improvement in their social inclusion and environmental sustainability. He has proposed corresponding structural reforms of macroeconomic theory and policy, corporate governance, and the international economic architecture, which he characterizes as an agenda to adapt the “source code” and “operating system” of market economies to 21st century circumstances and thereby improve their social and political cohesion as well as growth. A former senior US government official and international organization chief executive, he is the author of numerous publications, including Human-Centred Economics: The Living Standards of Nations, which the Financial Times selected as one of the best books of 2024 on Economics.
He currently serves as Senior Economic Adviser to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development; Senior Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies; Nonresident Senior Fellow of the The Brookings Institution; and Special Advisor to the United Nations Economist Network. He previously served as Director of the Research Department and G20/G7 Sherpa of the International Labour Organization as well as founder and chairman of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board, a precursor of the International Sustainability Standards Board. He was formerly a Managing Director of the World Economic Forum; Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute; Special Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy and National Security Council Senior Director for International Economic Affairs in the second Clinton-Gore Administration; and economic policy advisor to former US Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle.
Long bio
Richard Samans is an internationally-recognized expert on strengthening the growth and development prospects of economies through fundamental improvement in their social inclusion and environmental sustainability. He has proposed related structural reforms of macroeconomic theory and policy, corporate governance and the international economic architecture, which he characterizes as an agenda to adapt the “source code” and “operating system” of market economies to 21st century circumstances and thereby improve their social and political cohesion as well as growth. He currently serves as Senior Economic Adviser to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development; Senior Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies; Nonresident Senior Fellow of The Brookings Institution; and Special Advisor to the United Nations Economist Network. He is author of Human-Centred Economics: The Living Standards of Nations, which the Financial Times recognized as one of the best books of 2024 on Economics.
For the past 30 years, he has been developing in theory and practice a concrete agenda to render market-based growth and development, i.e., capitalism, fundamentally more human-centered in the sense of being more directly focused on improving median living standards—“aggregate social welfare”—than GDP or “aggregate production” alone. This requires rebalancing the conventional focus of economists and policymakers on markets and the accumulation of mainly tangible capital with an equivalent formal emphasis on the ongoing strengthening of institutions—legal and regulatory norms, policy incentives and public administrative capacity—across the wide spectrum of policy domains that enable and diffuse national economic progress from a kitchen-table perspective, i.e., in the primary dimensions of household living standards, which is to say the everyday material lived experience of people.
He is former Director of the International Labour Organization’s Research Department and its Sherpa to the G20 and G7 processes as well as founder and chairman of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board, a precursor of the new International Sustainability Standards Board. He served previously as a Managing Director of the World Economic Forum; Director-General of the Global Green Growth Institute; Special Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy and National Security Council Senior Director for International Economic Affairs in the second Clinton-Gore Administration; and economic policy advisor to US Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle.
His areas of expertise include international trade, financial, development, labor and environmental policy; corporate, multilateral and multistakeholder governance; and corporate sustainability reporting standards. He has worked extensively among governmental, academic, business and trade union leaders in the US and around the world, having lived and held senior positions in Europe, Asia and the US.
He has served in the United Nations system also as a member of the Secretary General’s Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals; ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work; UN Environment Programme’s Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System; and Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Transitional Working Group. He is a former member of the Transitional Advisory Group of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation’s International Sustainability Standards Board and is currently a member of its Integrated Reporting and Connectivity Council.
Earlier in his career, he drafted much of the early US trade and labor rights legislation, including the Section 301 cause of action and related provisions of various US trade agreements and programs, as trade legislative assistant to the House Ways and Means Committee member who pioneered this area, Rep. Don J. Pease (D-OH). Working thereafter for Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (D-MI) during early consideration of NAFTA, he drafted legislation to exclude labor rights, environmental protection, adjustment assistance, rules of origin and border infrastructure from Congressional fast-track (no amendment) negotiating authority. This approach gained the support of nearly a third of the Senate and a majority of its Democratic Caucus. Although the effort was successfully resisted by the Bush I Administration, these were the primary areas of the accord rewritten a quarter century later in the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. During this period, he was also the staff coordinator of a task force of 15 Senate Democrats appointed by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to shape the Caucus’ economic strategy after the Persian Gulf War. Mitchell later credited the extended unemployment insurance component of this package—which Sens. Sarbanes, Sasser, Kennedy, Riegle and others promoted every day for weeks on the Senate floor against the Administration’s opposition—as a key factor in the shift of public opinion about President Bush’s job performance before the 1992 race, during which Samans served as economic issues staff to two Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Kerrey and Tsongas.
Later, working for Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-SD), he crafted a package of 20+ executive actions and commitments agreed by the Clinton Administration across multiple areas of international economic policy in return for the support of the Leader and other Caucus members for the Administration’s proposed renewal of trade negotiating authority. Although the House ended up rejecting the Administration’s request, this package was a precursor of a number of subsequently adopted reforms, including the Executive Order President Clinton issued requiring environmental reviews of trade agreements, the drafting of which Samans co-led while subsequently working in the White House.
In the Clinton-Gore Administration, he also led interagency coordination of the Enhanced Heavily-Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt relief strategy, helping to bring the Treasury Department along on a solid package of debt restructuring for African and other poor countries. (Previously, he had drafted debt relief legislation in the House of Representatives during the Latin American debt crisis that was given a hearing and became a focus of debate with Treasury Secretary Baker, who was resisting such restructuring). Supported by an extraordinary left-right coalition, the Enhanced HIPC initiative was part of a broader intended reorientation of international economic policy that the President described as “putting a human face on the global economy”. Samans served as the focal point in the White House for the process of policy development and interagency coordination across trade, labor, environmental and development policy aimed at operationalizing this concept. However, this early effort to move beyond the Washington Consensus and standard neoliberal approach to global economic integration and development was cut short by the 2000 election.
He later elaborated upon these ideas in a trio of policy briefs as a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. And he joined the World Economic Forum, where he spent the following decade leading the creation of a large portfolio of multistakeholder action- and policy-oriented initiatives applying private sector resources and expertise to such public challenges as HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, climate change and environmental sustainability, basic education and workforce skilling, bribery and corruption, trade policy and facilitation, development cooperation and finance, social inclusion, gender parity, etc., while deepening its working relationship with civil society and the intergovernmental community.
A US national, he is fluent in French and married with two children. Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware and Dresher, Pennsylvania, he completed his undergraduate education at Tufts University and graduate education at Columbia University.
CV/Resume
See LinkedIn profile.