Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, is advising the Spanish Government on economic affairs, a role she too holds with the European Commission and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s research arm, the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research.
García-Herrero’s current advisory work follows years of research focused on financial and banking issues, monetary policy, and emerging markets, particularly China and its global impact. She has been chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis since June 2015, concurrently serving as an adjunct Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She also holds adjunct professorships at Sunyatsen University and recently joined the board of insurance company AGEAS as an independent member.
Beyond her academic and governmental roles, García-Herrero is a senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, a position she has maintained since 2015. She also serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the East Asia Institute of the National University of Singapore since 2020. Her affiliations extend to advisory boards for the Real Instituto Elcano in Madrid, the Berlin-based think tank MERICS, and the Emerging Market Institute of Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.
In 2015, García-Herrero, then a visiting scholar at Bruegel, analyzed the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) system, noting its origins in a period of fixed exchange rates and the subsequent decline in relevance as global currencies became more liquid. She observed that the SDR, created in 1969, had become largely irrelevant as an international reserve asset, representing only about 2% of global reserves. She highlighted the lack of interest in expanding the SDR basket, even as more countries adopted flexible exchange rate regimes.
At the time, García-Herrero pointed to China’s campaign to include the Renminbi (RMB) in the SDR basket as a catalyst for renewed attention to the system. She suggested that the People’s Bank of China’s decision to allow RMB depreciation in August 2015 was, in part, a move to meet IMF requirements for SDR inclusion, aligning with a desire for greater currency flexibility.
García-Herrero frequently contributes to business television, appearing on Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, and Reuters, among other outlets.
