José Miguel Benavente is currently the Executive Vice President of the Chilean Economic Development Agency (Corfo), after his appointment by President Gabriel Boric. Prior to this role, he was the Principal Lead Specialist of the Competitiveness and Innovation Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a division of which he was his chief while based in Washington DC.
Mr. Benavente was Full Professor at the Business School at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and was for more than a decade an Academician at the Department of Economics at Universidad de Chile. His professional work, research, and teaching topics include areas of economic development, innovation, productivity, R&D, SMEs, entrepreneurship, and economics of arts and culture, among others. He is even the author and co-author of a hundred articles and books on these topics.
He has been a columnist for major media outlets, editor of an indexed scientific journal, consultant to international organizations, and for ten years, advisor and vice president of the National Innovation Council of Chile.
José Miguel Benavente is an Industrial Civil Engineer from the Católica University of Valparaíso, has a Master’s in Economics from the University of Chile, and holds a Master of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Oxford in England.