Professor Greene has spent his career as an economist in the public sector and has taught economics at universities in the United States and Singapore. He has extensive experience in macroeconomics, with a specialization in public finance, and is the author of two textbooks: Public Finance: An International Perspective (2012 and Revised Edition, 2021) and Macroeconomic Analysis and Policy: A Systematic Approach (2018), both published by World Scientific.
Professor Greene worked as a macroeconomist at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board (1976-78) and as an economic analyst focusing on tax and employment issues at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (1978-81) before joining the International Monetary Fund as a staff economist in 1981. At the Fund Professor Greene worked on numerous countries in Sub-Saharan Africa before joining the Fund’s Research Department, where he was among the first to write on the external debt problems of Sub-Saharan Africa. He also taught macroeconomics at George Mason University. Beginning in 1990 he began working on countries in Eastern and Central Europe and served as the Fund’s Resident Representative in Romania from 1992 through 1995. He then joined the IMF Institute, the Fund’s training and capacity building department, teaching, developing, and leading courses on financial programming, fiscal policy, external sector issues, and the interaction of macroeconomic and financial sector policy at IMF headquarters and abroad. From 2004 through 2010 he was Deputy Director of the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute, the Fund’s regional training center for Asia and the Pacific, where he conducted a variety of training programs in South and East Asia. While in Singapore he also created and taught a semester-long master’s level public finance course at Singapore Management University.
Since retiring from the Fund in 2010, Professor Greene has taught master-level courses in public finance, macroeconomics, economic growth, and the economics of poverty and inequality at Singapore Management University and conducted training programs in macroeconomic analysis and public finance for officials at Bank Negara Malaysia, the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He has also led training programs in financial programming and macroeconomics for Asian officials as a consultant for the ADB and International Monetary Fund. Professor Greene has served as an economic editorial advisor for the ADB’s Asian Development Outlook since 2012 and, since 2016, the Asian Development Outlook Update. In addition, he has analyzed and prepared reports on macroeconomic accounts in Bhutan and Tajikistan for the ADB.
Professor Greene has a B.A. in economics from Princeton University and a J.D. in Law and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, recipient of the Humphrey Fellowship in Law and Economics at the University of Michigan, and winner of a Special Merit Award in the AMEX Bank Review competition. He is also a member of the American Economic Association and the Bar Association of the District of Columbia and a past board member of the Economic Society of Singapore. Professor Greene served as President of the Society of Government Economists and has organized many panels at the annual meetings of the Allied Social Science Associations and regional economic society conferences. He has published in numerous journals and undertaken research on a variety of topics, including public finance, external debt, private investment in developing countries, the balance of payments, and macroeconomic accounts, focusing on countries in Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. Besides his work in economics, he has performed pro bono (volunteer) legal work in bankruptcy for the D.C. Bar and on family law for the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in Washington, DC.
