Well-known maritime trade guru Jan Hoffmann is leaving the United Nations after 30 years to join the World Bank in Washington DC.
The German economist is joining the bank’s transport department as the global lead on maritime transport and trade facilitation.
He is currently head of the trade logistics branch at United Nations Trade and Development in Geneva, the body until recently known as UNCTAD. He starts at the World Bank on 3 January.
Hoffmann is known for his detailed data-informed insights into global trade and logistics flows, and the policies and other influences that drive them.
His energy, passion and good humour have won him many friends in governments and industry.
His new role will be to work with the bank’s global and regional teams to support World Bank client countries to reform and expand investment in their port sectors, advance digitalisation and improve cross-border trade and transit.
He will also lead global analytics work on port performance and reform, among other things.
Hoffmann wrote on LinkedIn that he will be working closely with the bank’s trade department to advance its joint work on transit facilitation and port reforms, and to lead the bank’s international partnership on issues related to maritime and transit facilitation.
He has worked in the UN system for 30 years, first as an economic affairs officer at the International Maritime Organization in London, before six years at the Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean in Chile, and then at UN Trade and Development since 2003.
Hoffmann said he was sad to leave “an amazing team of colleagues” in Geneva but was “looking forward to new challenges and opportunities to support global maritime development with old and new friends and colleagues at the World Bank”.
He said he was thankful to his wife, Elena. The US will be the seventh country they have lived in together since 1983.
