Senior Program Officer, Thailand

Dr. Nalitra Thaiprasert is a senior program officer for Economics programming for The Asia Foundation in Thailand. She leads program implementation in economic-related reform initiatives, including competition reforms, bilateral trade and investment issues. She was the lead author for the Foundation’s study Revisiting the Pandemic: Surveys on the Impact of Covid-19 on Small Businesses and Workers.

Nalitra has served as an economist, assistant professor at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Economics, and researcher in most of her career (in both the U.S. and Thailand). She also understands the mindset of NGOs on inclusion, resilience, and social accountability from spending over two years working with them. Nalitra has conducted several research projects for the world’s leading agencies in the development sector, including recent projects on impacts of Covid-19 and other disruptive factors on the Thai economy for UNICEF, and the Social Protection Diagnostic Review for Thailand’s UN Joint Programme. Her research interests include economic development, international and regional economics, and economy of Thailand and ASEAN. She has published many research papers and won the Golden Elephant Award for the Best Young Researcher in Social Science from Chiang Mai University in 2014.

Education: Nalitra earned her doctoral and master’s degrees in International Development (Development Economics) from Nagoya University, Japan, with the support of a Japanese government scholarship. She received a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Chulalongkorn University with first-class honors