Thierry Buchs is a seasoned emerging market economist specialized in development finance and impact management, with 15+ years of operational experience in various institutional and cultural contexts, in Switzerland, the U.S. and Latin America.
A Swiss national, Thierry holds a PhD degree in international economics from the Geneva Graduate Institute and a Master’s Degree in international relations from Tufts University in Medford MA (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy).
He has spent most of his career working on international development issues, first as a consultant with the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, and later on as an economist for the Swiss Government working on macroeconomic support projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. He joined the International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group) as a senior economist, first in the Chief Economist Office and then in the Corporate Portfolio Management division from 2002 to 2005. He returned to Switzerland in 2005 as the Head of the Private Sector Development Division of SECO (State Secretariat for Economic Affairs) before becoming Head of Economic Cooperation at the Swiss Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, where he led the development and supervision of the Swiss economic development cooperation program in Colombia. In 2016, he left the Swiss Government and joined Obviam AG, a private asset manager based in Bern which managed SIFEM (Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets), the Swiss Development Finance Institution, where he served as a Head of Policy, and also led the ESG and Impact team. He returned to the Swiss Government in 2022, as a senior advisor on private sector engagement, working on blended finance issues.
Thierry is also member of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), and has published various academic research papers (IMF Working Papers, Economics of Transition, MOST-MOCT, Aussenwirtschaft).