Professor Avi Ben-Bassat is a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), and heads the project on Structural Reforms in the Israeli Economy. Professor Ben-Bassat also serves as President of The Israeli Economic Association.
Professor Ben-Bassat was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1944. He earned his B.A., M.A. (Cum Laude), and Ph.D. in Economics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His M.A. dissertation was on "Capital Stock and Investment Behavior in Israeli Industry, 1955-1968," and his Ph.D. dissertation was on "The Optimal Composition of Israel’s Foreign Exchange Reserves."
Professor Ben-Bassat has taught at leading universities in Israel, including Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he currently teaches at the Department of Economics. In 1981 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in the United States and in 2002 he returned to Stanford as a visiting scholar, in conjunction with the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Professor Ben-Bassat served as the Director-General of the Ministry of Finance from 1999 to 2001. He served in a variety of positions at the Bank of Israel, including Senior Director of the Research Department & Foreign Currency Department, from 1991 to 1996.
Professor Ben-Bassat has written and edited numerous books and articles, including Capital Stock and Industrial Investment Behavior, 1955-1968 (Bank of Israel Research Department, 1972), Managing Foreign Exchange Reserves: The Israeli Experience (Bank of Israel Research Department, 1979), The Israeli Economy, 1985-1998: From Government Intervention to Market Economics (MIT Press, 2002).
He and his wife have two children and reside in Jerusalem.