Dr. Sonia Plaza

Dr. Sonia Plaza is a Senior Economist & Program Manager at the World Bank where she works on development, remittances, migration, diaspora, refugees, trade, tech & finance.

She is also the co-chair of the Diaspora Thematic working group of KNOMAD (Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development). Sonia was born in Lima, Peru. Her father had a constructing firm, so some of her earliest childhood memories are of traveling with him to poor areas including Ayacucho where he was working on projects. This is how she was first exposed to development work, and it shaped her.

She has published extensively on migration, remittances and the diaspora.

Dr. Plaza attended the University of Lima and earned a degree in Economics, after which she joined Chase Manhattan Bank, and was then invited to join the Peruvian Ministry of Trade as a manager responsible for counter trade and debt swap agreements. She also has a dual degree from Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania in International Economics and Development. She was Professor of Economics (International Economics) at the Peruvian School of Foreign Service and at the University of Lima in Peru, and was adjunct faculty (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics) at The American University in Washington, DC.

Her research interests include international migration, labour mobility, trade, and the future of labour.