Meet Mayara Felix: The Economist Helping Make Markets More Efficient in Latin America and Beyond

“I think it’s more important today than ever to understand how developing countries could leverage trade and access to global markets to grow,” says new faculty member Mayara Felix, an expert on international trade and economic development.

Her research focuses on developing, middle-income countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia. These countries face challenges to their growth, says Felix, but also have considerable state capacity and the opportunity to address economic obstacles with evidence-based policy.

“There’s a lot of inequality in these countries, and there’s a lot of poverty. But there’s also plenty of richness in them, and an actual role for the state,” Felix says. The governments in these countries have pursued various policies to increase economic growth, and she wants to better understand what works and what doesn’t.

A sequence of graduate courses in international economics helped her realize “the incredible power that international trade and globalization have to change people’s lives, especially those in lowand middle-income countries,” she says. She went on to specialize in economic development and international trade so that she could “focus on a corner of research that seeks to understand problems and propose solutions to issues faced by low- and middle- income countries through the lens of market forces.”

The seed of Felix’s interest in these questions was planted early. Growing up in Brazil in the mid-nineties in an era of trade liberalization, she didn’t understand why some communities had so much wealth while others were just scraping by.

“I grew up in a poor community in Northeast Brazil, and in that context I was only able to understand the issues around me through a zero-sum lens,” she recalls. As Brazil opened its economy to the world, she thought the only solution to poverty in her country would be to “take from the rich and give to the poor.” But by high school, she says, “I had matured enough to understand that the world is complex. I needed more knowledge and more tools—not only to better see the issues around me, but to know how to come up with solutions.”

Felix’s desire to understand and solve economic problems led her to explore economics as an undergraduate. She became hooked on the field after a class on game theory at Mount Holyoke College, and then went on to earn her PhD in Economics from MIT.

Now Felix studies policies intended to improve market efficiency, such as import tariff reductions, free trade agreements, and outsourcing. She’s especially intrigued by the ways even well-designed policies can have unexpected consequences, and how firms respond to policies that affect their ability to compete with other firms.

In the classroom, she wants her students to develop a strong understanding of when and why countries might need to use policy to intervene in markets. “Students are really connected with policy,” she says. She plans to teach classes that allow students to engage critically with economic policy around the world. “I’d like to look at the intersection of trade and development and ask, ‘where across the globe have we seen these types of policies, and have they been successful or unsuccessful? What does policy evaluation look like in this space?’”

“I am so, so happy that I ended up here,” she says. “I think it’s my dream placement.”