Aashish Mehta is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He is a development economist and has published work on the economics of education, income inequality, electricity sector reforms and regulation, price transmission, the coffee crisis, discrimination, and the evolving composition of employment in developing economies.

Before joining UCSB, he served as an economist at the Asian Development Bank, where he initially provided analytical support for work on electricity sector reforms in several Central Asian Republics and later the Philippines.  He also served in the Bank’s research department, writing about macroeconomic developments in Asia – especially in India.

Currently, he is working on papers examining why developing economies’ wage distributions have tended to fracture when they were liberalized; on the types of jobs that are growing and shrinking in the developing world; and on the problems faced by organizations that distribute subsidized food through subsidiaries whose actions cannot be controlled.