Dániel Palotai, Vice President of the Hungarian Economic Association, President of the Competitiveness Section of the HEA and former Chief Economist of the MNB will become Member of the IMF Executive Board consisting of 24 Directors from 1 November. Dániel Palotai will be the first Hungarian Executive Director to represent the Central and Eastern European region including Turkey, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Slovenia and Kosovo as member of the top decision-making body of the International Monetary Fund.

Dániel Palotai received his degree in economics at the Faculty of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest in 2004 with a minor in actuarial science. He began his career at the National Bank of Hungary, acting as a creator and expert of the MNB’s early retirement model. From 2007 he worked at the European Central Bank as an analyst responsible for certain EU Member States outside the euro area gaining an insight into financial crisis management. Dániel Palotai became head of the Macroeconomics Department of the Ministry of National Economy in November 2010 and was actively involved in the development of Hungary’s structural reform programme, and as a member of the Economic Policy Committee of the European Union he worked towards the economic and financial stabilization of Hungary. He served as Executive Director and Chief Economist of the MNB from March 2013 until the autumn of 2020. In 2015 he received the Sándor Popovics Award in recognition of his contribution to the successfully accomplished monetary policy changes. He served as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the European Central Bank and of the Economic and Financial Committee of the European Union. He was elected as President of the Competitiveness Section of the Hungarian Economic Association in 2016 and Vice President of the HEA in 2017, currently completing his second term.

We congratulate Mr. Palotai on his appointment and wish him every success in his work!