The Advisory Board supports and challenges the Director General in VATT’s strategic development

VATT Advisory Board 2022-2024:

Professor Otto Toivanen, Aalto University (Chairman of the Advisory Board)
Professor Panu Poutvaara, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leiter des ifoZentrums für Internationalen Institutionenvergleich und Migrationsforschung
Professor of Practice Ritva Reinikka, Aalto University and HGSE
Managing Director Suvi-Anne Siimes, The Finnish Pension Alliance TELA
Director General Markus Sovala, Statistics Finland
Director General, Ministry of Finance

Director General Mikael Collan and VATT’s personnel representative, Researcher Ilpo kauppinen also sit on the Advisory Board. Chief Researcher Kari Hämäläinen is the secretary.

Otto Toivanen is professor of economics at the Belgian Catholic University of Leuven and at Aalto University in Helsinki. He was previously professor and director at HECER and director of the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Economics (FDPE). He has also been a visiting researcher at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. He gained his PhD in economics from the University of Warwick in 1995. Toivanen’s research focuses on the economics of innovations and competition. His research topics have included the granting of research and development subsidies to firms and the impact of these, the role of education in becoming an inventor, the income implications of inventing and firms’ sector entry decisions.

Panu Poutvaara has been Professor of Economics at the University of Munich and Research Director of the Ifo Institute since 2010. Prior to that he was Professor of Public Finances at the University of Helsinki (fiver-year term 2006-2010) and a visiting researcher at Harvard. Poutvaara is a member of the CESifo, IZA and CReAM (University College London) research networks. Poutvaara’s research themes are public finances, political economics and international migration. He has researched subjects including the impact of labour mobility on public and private incentives to invest in education, how voters react to electoral promises and actual policies, and selection of emigrants.

Ritva Reinikka is the Professor of Practice in development economics at the Aalto University School of Business and the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics. Reinikka has a doctorate in economics, and she is one the leading researchers and experts in development politics in Finland. Her career has advanced from conducting academic research for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to serving as an expert for the World Bank. At the World Bank, where she worked for 20 years, Reinikka served as a director of research and country director in South Africa, and was responsible for the World Bank’s human development work programme in education, health and social protection in the Africa region, to name but a few. Recently, Reinikka has been involved in conducting an independent assessment on the impact and effectiveness of Finland’s development cooperation (2015) and in studying Finland’s global role in education (2018).