José Luis Curbelo

José Luis Curbelo
José Luis Curbelo

Chairman and CEO of Cofides

José Luis Curbelo is an economist with a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley and a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of the Basque Country. He has also attended training programmes at Harvard University, Harvard Business School, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government, the University of California-Los Angeles, the Amsterdam Institute of Finance, and the World Bank, among others.

He was Investment Director of COFIDES between 1999 and 2009. He has also held the positions of Vice President of Development Strategies and Public Policies and Chief Economist at CAF-Development Bank of Latin America, General Director of the Basque Institute of Competitiveness (Orkestra) and Head of the Small Enterprise Development Unit of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), among others.

In the academic field, he is a Senior Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He was Dean of the Faculty of Law and Economics at the Camilo José Cela University, Director of the BBVA Chair of Entrepreneurship at the Antonio de Nebrija University, Professor of Project Finance at the Carlos III University, Lecturer at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte (Brazil). He has consulted for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and is the author of numerous monographs and specialised publications.