Carlos Alberto Primo Braga, a Brazilian national, is currently the Senior Manager of the Informatics Program at the Information Solutions Group of the World Bank. He is also the Director of the Development Gateway portal -- a web-based initiative for sharing information on development-related topics - acting as the liaison between the World Bank Group and the Development Gateway Foundation. Before assuming this position in June 2001, Dr. Braga was the Manager of infoDev (the Information for Development Program), a multi-donor grant facility administered by the Global Information and Communication Technologies Department. In that capacity, he was responsible for a portfolio of more than 200 innovative projects funded by infoDev grants worldwide. He was also in charge of the Bank's Y2K outreach activities in the period 1998-2000.

Dr. Braga joined the World Bank Group in 1991, as an economist in the International Trade Division of the Bank's International Economics Department. Over the 1991-94 period, he was responsible for research and projects focusing on trade in services, intellectual property rights, regional integration agreements, and trade and the environment. He was the main author of a Board paper on regionalism and, together with UNCTAD staff, prepared Liberalizing International Trade in Services: A Handbook (1994). In 1995, he moved to the Industry & Energy Department as Senior Economist. In 1997, he was appointed Program Manager of infoDev that was then hosted by the Energy, Mining & Telecommunications Department.

Prior to joining the Bank, Dr. Braga served as a consultant to the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1990. He was a Fulbright Scholar (1988/89) at the Paul Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), The Johns Hopkins University and taught there as a visiting professor over the 1988-98 period. He was an assistant professor at the Faculdade de Economia e Administracao (University of Sao Paulo) and Senior Researcher at the Fundacao Instituto de Pesquisas Economicas, both in Brazil, in the 1980s. He has also been a lecturer on the economics of intellectual property rights at the World Trade Institute, University of Berne, Switzerland.

Dr. Braga received a degree in Mechanical Engineering (1976) from the Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica (Brazil), and an MSc (1980) in Economics from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He holds a PhD (1984) in Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.