Experience & Activities

Dr Hubert Nii-Aponsah is an Economist and Governance specialist with extensive operational and analytical experience in public sector development. His experiences cover leading research projects, and creating global datasets and indexes, notably the GovTech Maturity Index, which measures progress in public sector digital transformation in 198 economies. He also has significant operational experience in initiating and managing World Bank Public Financial Management (PFM) projects, as well as academic experience teaching both undergraduate and graduate-level quantitative courses, including Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Statistics, Data Science and Econometrics.

Prior to working with the World Bank, he was the Resident Economist and Deputy Head of the Center for Economic Governance and Political Affairs at Imani Center for Policy and Education where his work on the Imanifesto research project received extensive local media coverage, an international award from the Atlas Foundation, and recognition as one of the best policy reports by the 2016 Global Go To Think Tank Index published by the University of Pennsylvania. Hubert holds a masters degree in Economics from Central Michigan University and holds a PhD in the Economics and Governance of Technological Change from Maastricht University (UNU-MERIT). His core research interests encompass the drivers, effects and linkages between modern automation technologies (such as AI), labour market outcomes, GovTech, and trade.

Hubert’s research investigates the effects of the adoption of new automation technologies on the future world of work with regards to labour productivity growth, wages, and employment in advanced and developing countries, His research also links advanced and developing regions through automation-induced reshoring and considers automation disruption in the Gender, Age and Skills dimensions of the labour markets of both regions.