Eduardo Aninat

Dr. Eduardo Aninat is one of Latin America’s most distinguished economists and international public servants — a Harvard-trained economist who served as Finance Minister of Chile during one of the most transformative decades in the country’s economic history, and subsequently as Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, where he was one of four members of the Fund’s senior management team during a period of acute global financial turbulence.

Economics speaker Eduardo Aninat studied economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile before earning both his Master’s and PhD in Economics from Harvard University. He began his academic career teaching public finance and economic development at his alma mater and as an assistant professor at Boston University, before spending over a decade as a principal of Aninat, Méndez y Asociados — one of Latin America’s largest economic consultancies — advising governments and international institutions including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank on tax policy, debt restructuring, and development finance.

His entry into Chilean public service deepened progressively through the early 1990s, when he served as official negotiator for the Chilean foreign debt under President Patricio Aylwin, and as chief debt negotiator and senior advisor at the Central Bank of Chile and the Ministry of Finance. In 1989 he served as Harvard University’s Latin American Coordinator for its International Tax Program. In March 1994, President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle appointed him Minister of Finance — a position he held for nearly six years, guiding Chile’s fiscal policy through a period of strong growth, the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the consolidation of one of the region’s most robust macroeconomic frameworks.

From Chile’s Finance Ministry to the IMF’s Senior Management

During his tenure as Finance Minister, Aninat also served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1995–96, and for three years as a member of the Development Committee of both institutions, representing Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay, and Paraguay — a bloc of six nations whose economic interests he championed through landmark discussions on debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries and reform of the international financial architecture. In December 1999, IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus appointed him Deputy Managing Director, a position in which he served until June 2003 as one of the Fund’s four-member management team, chairing Executive Board meetings and overseeing the Fund’s policy engagement across member governments during the Argentine crisis, the global dot-com correction, and the post-9/11 economic slowdown. He subsequently served as Chilean Ambassador to Mexico and as a board member of the Center for Financial Stability in New York.

As a speaker, Eduardo Aninat draws on a career that spans academic economics, high-stakes government policy-making, and multilateral institution leadership at the highest level. His keynotes offer senior audiences a grounded, jargon-free analysis of the forces shaping the global economy — trade, fiscal sustainability, financial stability, development, and the evolving role of international institutions — delivered with the authority of someone who has sat at the table where the decisions were actually made. He speaks in both Spanish and English, making him equally compelling for Latin American, European, and international audiences.