Vito Tanzi is a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank. From 1981-2000 he was Director of Fiscal Affairs at the International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC. Vito Tanzi received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and, before joining the International Monetary Fund in 1974, he was Professor and Chairman, Department of Economics at the American University. He has also been on the faculty of the George Washington University and a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Stanford Research Institute. He has published many books including The Individual Income Tax and Economic Growth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Inflation and the Personal Income Tax (Cambridge University Press, 1980); The Underground Economy in the United States and Abroad (Lexington Press, 1982); Taxation, Inflation and Interest Rates (IMF, 1984); Public Finance in Developing Countries (Edward Elgar, 1991); and Taxation in an Integrating World (Brookings, 1995).
He has edited several books, the most recent of which is Income Distribution and High Quality Growth (MIT Press, 1998). Dr. Tanzi has written a large number of articles in leading professional journals like the American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, The Journal of Public Economics.
His major interests are public finance, monetary theory, and macroeconomics. In the period from 1990 to 1994, he was President of the International Institute of Public Finance.