Neil G. Ruiz
The World Bank

Neil G. Ruiz is Migration Specialist at the Development Economics Prospects Group of The World Bank. He examines the impact of migration on economic development, migration policy and higher education in developing countries.

Ruiz has both research and practical field experience in the area of migration. He continues to be Non-Resident Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at The Brookings Institution and he was a consultant for the Asian Development Bank where he worked on their first study on overseas workers remittances that led to a report titled Enhancing the Efficiency of Overseas Filipino Workers’ Remittances. Ruiz was also a summer research associate at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) where he worked on migration and development issues as well as on a project on internally displaced people. He has recently published a policy paper at MPI on “Protecting Overseas Workers: Lessons and Cautions from the Philippines” (with Dovelyn Rannveig Agunias). He also comments on the responsibilities of migrant sending country governments, US immigration policy, temporary worker programs, and the linkages between migration and development.

Ruiz was the founding head of the Brain Gain Network (BGN) in Boston that spearheaded several entrepreneurial initiatives in his parent’s home country, the Philippines. Together with a group of Filipino and Filipino-American graduate students at MIT, he was the co-founder and President of the Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO), a business plan competition in the Philippines for the purpose of promoting world class, innovation-fueled entrepreneurship that will contribute to Philippine economic development. PESO serves as a vehicle to not only provide monetary incentives for new Philippine startups, but also to transfer knowledge and expertise from MIT and other high-skilled US-based Filipinos to the Philippines. Originally started as an MIT student organization, it has grown to becoming a Philippine-based non-governmental organization that has significant partnerships and support from major Philippine foundations, venture capitalists, the government, and the Filipino diaspora. In its four years of existence, PESO has taught business plan basics to over two thousand participants and it has identified, mentored, and provided seed funding to over 30 technology startups in the Philippines. Ruiz has also founded several other initiatives in the Philippines with his Boston-based Filipino colleagues including CentroMigrante, a business that combines developmental architecture with a self-help business model to offer a sustainable solution to the urban slum problem that migrant communities face. Ruiz and his team won the grand prize of the MIT$100K Entrepreneurship Competition to start this venture in the Philippines. He was also part of two other projects to help rural communities in the Philippines build small and medium enterprises in the peanut industry and also to help rebuild coral reefs.

Ruiz received his B.A. in Political Science with High Honors and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.Sc. in Economic History from Oxford University. He will be receiving his Ph.D. in political economy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this June 2008. His dissertation, titled “Made for Export: Labor Migration, State Power, and Higher Education in a Developing Society,” proposes a theory for why developing countries create policies for exporting labor.