Jan Rielaender

Jan Rielaender is Head of Division for Resilient and Sustainable Development Strategies at the OECD Development Centre in Paris. He leads the Centre’s work at the intersection of climate action and economic development, helping governments in emerging and developing economies build strategies that pursue climate resilience and economic growth together.
For more than a decade, Rielaender directed the OECD’s Multi-dimensional Country Reviews, the organisation’s flagship integrated country-strategy programme. He built the practice from a handful of countries into more than twenty engagements across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, working directly with finance and planning ministries to turn economic diagnostics into national reform agendas. The reviews bring together macroeconomic analysis, public finance, social policy, governance and the green transition in a single national strategy, developed through structured peer learning among governments and carried through to implementation. His recent work spans Southeast Asia, including reviews of Viet Nam, Thailand and Lao PDR.
Jan Rielaender’s current focus is climate resilience and fiscal sustainability. He directs fiscal-risk analysis for climate disasters, stress-testing public finances against physical climate shocks so that governments can plan for the cost of floods, droughts and storms before they arrive. He also leads the Centre’s work on energy pricing and subsidy reform, quantifying energy transfers and the fiscal and social trade-offs of reform, most recently across the six economies of the Western Balkans. He argues that climate action and development can reinforce one another, and that the economies most exposed to climate change need strategy and financing built on that premise.
A German national, Rielaender began his career at the World Bank and the United Nations before joining the OECD, where he has spent much of the past fifteen years. He holds master’s degrees in economics and in international relations from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, with graduate study in Seoul, and earlier degrees in Germany and Sweden.