Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran is an award-winning senior correspondent for the Economist.
He joined the editorial staff in 1992 as its London-based Latin America correspondent, and opened the magazine’s first regional bureau in Mexico City. From 1998 to 2006, he covered the politics, economics, business and technology of energy and the environment. From 2007 to 2011 his portfolio encompassed innovation, global health, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.
He is currently the magazine’s China Business & Finance Editor. His editorial responsibilities range from business and finance to science, technology and innovation.
He new book on the future of global innovation, published by Harper Collins, is “Need, Speed and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems”. Kirkus Reviews has called it “the perfect primer for the postindustrial age.” In reviewing the new book, the Financial Times declared that “Vaitheeswaran is a writer to whom it is worth paying attention.”
Vijay is a life member at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an advisor on sustainability and innovation to the World Economic Forum, and a regular speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative. He teaches at NYU’s Stern Business School, and his commentaries have appeared on NPR and the BBC, in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the New York Times. He has had the honor of addressing groups ranging from the US National Governors’ Association and the UN General Assembly to the Technology, Entertainment & Design (TED), Aspen Ideas Festival and AAAS conferences. He also serves as chairman of the Economist‘s provocative series of conferences on innovation known as the Ideas Economy.
His last book, “ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future,” co-authored with Iain Carson, was named a Book of the Year by The Financial Times. His first book, “Power to the People,” was reviewed by Nobel-prize winner John Holdren (currently the Chief Science Advisor to the White House) in Scientific American as “by far the most helpful, entertaining, up-to-date and accessible treatment of the energy-economy-environment problematique available.”
Vijay is an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was named a Harry S. Truman Presidential Scholar by the U.S. Congress.
