This is part of a series, ‘Economists Exchange’, featuring conversations between top FT commentators and leading economists about the coronavirus economic recovery

For more than three decades, Jeffrey Sachs has had a knack for placing himself at the heart of urgent economic policy issues — all of which seem to converge in our current crisis. In the late 1980s he worked on macroeconomic stabilisation and taming runaway inflation. From 1989 on, he advised governments on their economic transition from communism to liberal democracy — a model now under threat in some of those very countries as well as challenged in the west.

He subsequently moved into the rapidly growing field of the macroeconomics of health, then economic development more broadly. He served as special adviser to consecutive UN secretaries-general, first on the poverty eradication-focused Millennium Development Goals, then on their successor Sustainable Development Goals.