Isabel Estevez is deputy director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute’s Climate and Economic Transformation Program. Isabel’s work combines her academic background in institutional and development economics with years of experience advising governments and advocacy organizations in the design of transformative economic policies, including trade and industrial policies and strategic public investment.
Most recently, as senior policy advisor for the Sierra Club, Isabel has helped shape dozens of policy proposals, including legislation, aimed at building the US government’s strategic investment and planning capabilities; promoting sustainable trade, manufacturing, and procurement; and expanding investments that simultaneously advance environmental, social, and economic objectives. She has also advised the Ecuadorian Ministry of Planning and Development and the Ministry of Economic Policy among others, on industrial policy and trade.
Isabel holds a PhD and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BA in economics and in philosophy from Indiana University. She has taught at the University of Cambridge and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her master’s dissertation examined the global fragmentation of production and the challenges it poses for industrial policy design. Her doctoral research addresses the alignment of economic and industrial policy with well-being objectives. She is coauthor (with Ha-Joon Chang and Antonio Andreoni) of “Production: The Missing Dimension of the Human Capabilities Approach” for the European Journal of Development Research, and “New Global Rules, Policy Space, and Quality of Growth in Africa” in The Quality of Growth in Africa, a volume edited by Ravi Kanbur, Akbar Noman, and Joseph E. Stiglitz.