Carolin A. Crabbe

Carolin Crabbe is an economist with extensive experience in development, financial systems, and business growth. In particular, she developed several hallmark guarantee programs for emerging economies. One of these enabled banking sectors around the world to stretch into lending directly to microenterprises. Another was a bond guarantee facility which facilitated the issue of pure debt bonds in emerging markets, which was undertaken for the first time by Bolivia’s banking sector. She held senior positions at the Inter-American Development Bank and USAID, managed her own company the Global Finance Group and worked in commercial banks and the World Bank. She is a past Vice President and Founding Member of the Professional Bankers' Association, Senior Economic Advisor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Adjunct Professor at American University, and Fellow of the Economic Development Institute.

She grew up overseas and, in her career, worked in over forty countries in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. In Russia during the 1990s, she was the USAID Director of Private Sector programs aimed at helping Russia establish a market-based economy. It set up the stock exchange, supported small business development through over 200 centers throughout Russia, and a program to assist in developing rule of law. She has written on a number of financial and development issues including A Quarter Century of Pension Reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2005, (IDB), “Making Financial Markets Inclusive,” Infrastructure and Financial Markets Review (IFM), and "Bolivian Bank Leaps into Bond Market with A.I.D. as Partner," (Latin Finance).

Since retiring from development finance, she pursues life-long interests in the fine arts, and volunteers with the Washington Ballet, Chamber Dance, Washington National Cathedral and veterans’ groups. She has recently published her first historical novel on colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century and is working on follow-on novels covering the French and Indian War, American Revolution and Oklahoma land rush, as well as one on a pilot’s adventure in the world’s most treacherous flying conditions, i.e., over the “Hump” in the CBI Theater during World War II.