Maria-Luisa Escobar | World Bank Institute (WBI)

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Maria-Luisa Escobar

WBI Health Systems Practice

Maria-Luisa Escobar is a health economist and the Manager of the Health Systems Practice at the World Bank Institute. She has twenty years of experience working on health policy, health economics, and health system reform and also maintains a Non-Resident Fellow association with the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Ms. Escobar has worked with developing countries on the analysis and design of health policies, through the Inter-American Development Bank and later through the World Bank Group. She served as Director of Planning and Senior Advisor to the Minister of Health in Colombia, and later as Technical Advisor to the Minister of Social Protection, and the government of Colombia.

More recently, before joining the World Bank Institute, she worked on the analysis of innovative financing mechanisms for global health as a Fellow in Residence at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. She also developed a research agenda on the impact of health insurance in developing countries.

Her main interests are on health care financing and health policy, and on the development of effective strategies to transform technical knowledge into the implementation of health policy in developing countries.  

Some of Ms. Escobar's publications are:
Glassman, Amanda, María-Luisa Escobar, Ursula Giedion and Antonio Giuffrida, eds. "From few to many: a decade of health insurance expansion in Colombia." Washington, DC: IDB and Brookings Institution, December 2009.

De Ferranti, David, Charles C. Griffin, Maria-Luisa Escobar, Amanda Glassman and Gina Lagomarsino. "Innovative Financing for Global Health: Tools for Analyzing the Options." Working paper. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008.