Andrew Stone is the Adviser to the Director for IEG’s Financial, Private Sector, Infrastructure and Sustainable Development Department. He is also IEG’s lead technical specialist for private and financial sector development. His recent evaluation work concerns WBG Guarantees, Financial Inclusion, IFC’s Platforms Approach and IFC Additionality in Middle-Income Countries. Earlier work addressed the Doing Business Indicators, State-Owned Enterprise Reform, Trade Facilitation, Carbon Finance, the Rural Nonfarm Economy, Urban Transport, and support to small and medium enterprises.

Until 2012, he was Lead Private Sector Development Specialist in the Finance and Private Sector Unit of the Middle East and North Africa Region of the World Bank. A central focus of that work was the development and application of Investment Climate Assessments (ICAs), an instrument designed to provide a standard and comparable basis for assessing conditions for private enterprise operation and growth and for developing strategy and operations to address key constraints. He led a development policy loan in Yemen and co-authored the MENA regional flagship report on private sector development: From Privilege to Competition: Unlocking Private-Led Growth in the Middle East and North Africa (2009).

At the Bank, Andrew worked on both the methods for assessing the investment climate through enterprise surveys and policy analysis and the application of those methods in a variety of countries. His survey work pioneered the assessment of costs to private enterprises of regulatory and administrative compliance. In addition, his work investigated the identification and application of appropriate institutional approaches to regulatory reform.

Mr. Stone is coauthor of the book Investment Climate Around the World: Voices of the firms from the World Business Environment Survey (with Geeta Batra and Daniel Kaufmann, World Bank, 2003) and author of multiple articles, World Bank discussion papers and web-based resources on private sector development, business transactions costs, business-government consultation and empirical evaluation of business constraints.