Afshin Molavi was the co-director of the World Economy Roundtable, an ambitious exercise to re-map the global economy in the wake of The Great Recession. He was also a National Fellow with the New America Fellows Program. A former Dubai-based correspondent for the Reuters news agency, Tehran-based correspondent for the Washington Post, Riyadh-based business and economics journalist, and Washington-based contributor to the Financial Times, Mr. Molavi has written widely on the Middle East, US regional policy, the oil and gas industry, geo-economic trends in Asia, and globalization for a wide range of international publications. His articles and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, National Geographic, BusinessWeek, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Institutional Investor, the Journal of Commerce, and The Wilson Quarterly, among other publications. He comments regularly on Iran and U.S. policy toward the Middle East on CNN, the BBC, National Public Radio, and other broadcast outlets. He is also senior Middle East advisor at Oxford Analytica, a global macro analysis and advisory firm.
Mr. Molavi holds a master's degree in Middle East history and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he also studied Arabic. He has traveled widely across the Middle East and Asia as a journalist and geo-political risk analyst. He has also worked at the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector development arm of the World Bank, where he engaged in civil society outreach for the Middle East/North Africa and Southern Europe and Central Asia. He is the author of The Soul of Iran (Norton, 2005), dubbed by Foreign Affairs "a brilliant tableau of today's Iran."
As a fellow at New America, Mr. Molavi studied the geo-politics and geo-economics of the Middle East and Asia, as well as the links between economic development and democratization. He is currently studying the economic implications of the "the Arab Spring". He will also examine the "New Silk Road"—the growing trade, cultural, diplomatic, and business ties between the Middle East and Asia. Mr. Molavi is also interested in issues related to global economic development, globalization and culture, and the economics of immigration.