The move gives US Treasury a chance to recommend replacement, at time that US President Donald Trump is reshaping global economy.
Gita Gopinath, the No. 2 official at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), will leave her post at the end of August to return to Harvard University, the IMF has said.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva will name a successor to Gopinath in “due course”, the financial institution said in a statement on Monday.
Gopinath joined the fund in 2019 as chief economist, the first woman to serve in that role, and was promoted to first deputy managing director in January 2022.
No comment was immediately available from the United States Department of the Treasury, which manages the dominant US shareholding in the IMF. While European countries have traditionally chosen the IMF’s managing director, the US Treasury has traditionally recommended candidates for the first deputy managing director role.
Gopinath is an Indian-born US citizen.
The timing of the move caught some IMF insiders by surprise, and appears to have been initiated by Gopinath.
Gopinath, who had left Harvard to join the IMF, will return to the university as a professor of economics.
Her departure will offer the US Treasury a chance to recommend a successor at a time when President Donald Trump is seeking to restructure the global economy and end longstanding US trade deficits with high tariffs on imports from nearly all countries.
She will return to a university that has been in the Trump administration’s crosshairs after the school rejected demands to change its governance, hiring and admissions practices.
Georgieva said Gopinath joined the IMF as a highly respected academic and proved to be an “exceptional intellectual leader” during her time, which included the pandemic and global shocks caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Gita steered the Fund’s analytical and policy work with clarity, striving for the highest standards of rigorous analysis at a complex time of high uncertainty and rapidly changing global economic environment,” Georgieva said.
Gopinath has also overseen the fund’s multilateral surveillance and analytical work on fiscal and monetary policy, debt and international trade.
Gopinath said she was grateful for a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to work at the IMF, thanking both Georgieva and the previous IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, who appointed her as chief economist.
“I now return to my roots in academia, where I look forward to continuing to push the research frontier in international finance and macroeconomics to address global challenges, and to training the next generation of economists,” she said in a statement.
