Richard Grieveson is Deputy Director at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) and a member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG). He coordinates wiiw’s analysis and forecasting of Central, East and Southeast Europe. In addition he works on European policy analysis, European integration, EU enlargement, economic history, and political economy. He holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Vienna and Birkbeck. Previously he worked as a Director in the Emerging Europe Sovereigns team at Fitch Ratings and Regional Manager in the Europe team at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
David Zenz is responsible for development and deployment of R Shiny applications, data engineering and automation. He focusses on ETL and integration of large data, e.g. wiiw’s international databases on foreign trade, including detailed data pre-processing and statistical quality checks of various trade products and industry classifications, and is also in charge of statistical data on Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. He is currently enrolled in Master programmes in Economics and Statistics at the University of Vienna where he also holds a BSc in Economics.
Maryna Tverdostup is an Economist at wiiw and a country expert for Estonia. Her research interests cover diverse labour-market issues, including gender inequalities, labour mobility, immigrants’ integration and skills disparities. Her research also focuses on experimental analysis and game-theoretic modelling of markets with asymmetric information, as well microsimulation analysis. In her research, she has worked with various empirical data, including Austrian, Finnish and Estonian register-based data, EU survey data, and primary experimental data. She has been involved as a researcher or a PI in the EU framework, EU Commission, Interreg Europe projects, as well as projects funded by the Austrian Research Foundation and the Austrian National Bank. She holds a Ph.D. in economics and M.Sc. in financial mathematics from the University of Tartu, Estonia. Previously she worked as a postdoc at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and a visiting researcher at Aalto University, Finland.
Kristijan Fidanovski is an Economist at wiiw focusing on tobacco taxation and macroeconomic analysis in the Western Balkans. He is also a PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford’s Department of Social Policy and Intervention and a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, where he examines the discursive representation, policy manifestation, political drivers, and fertility effects of pronatalism in Eastern Europe. His other research interests include EU integration, labour market adaptation to population aging, bilateral disputes, and nationalism. He has provided consulting services to the European Union, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Oxford Analytica, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, among others. He holds an MA in International Relations with a focus on Eastern Europe from Georgetown University and University College London, respectively.
Olga Pindyuk is an Economist at wiiw. Her research focuses on foreign trade, in particular trade in services, and foreign direct investment. She is also country expert for Ukraine and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). She has extensive experience with services trade data and does research on modelling trade costs in services trade and on linkages between producer services trade and manufacturing. Previously, she worked as a consultant with the World Bank (Ukraine office) and the DFID Ukraine Trade Policy Project.
Vasily Astrov is an Economist at wiiw and country expert for Russia and other CIS countries. His research focuses on macroeconomic analysis and energy issues. He is also editor of the wiiw Monthly Report. In his recent research, he has analysed the economic effects of the global crisis and European energy security issues. He assembled comprehensive academic and international experience in the United Kingdom (University of Warwick), Germany (Westfälische Wilhelms Universität), Norway (University of Oslo) and Russia (St. Petersburg State University) and graduated in economics (M.Sc., Dipl.-Vw) and geography (B.A.).
Alexandra Bykova is the Deputy Head of the Statistics Department, responsible for coordination of department’s activities for the membership products, and an Economist. She is country expert for Kazakhstan and in charge of statistical coverage of Kazakhstan and Russia. Her thematic focus is on digitalisation and financial indicators. Alexandra has overall responsibility for the wiiw Monthly Database and is in charge of data collection from Eurostat. She coordinates the data part of the wiiw Monthly Report, and contributes to the further development of wiiw Databases and various wiiw data visualisation projects, in particular the CESEE Visual Data Explorer and Austria & CESEE. She obtained her Master’s degree in mathematical methods of economic analysis and PhD in Economics from the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
Branimir Jovanovic is an Economist at wiiw and country expert for North Macedonia and Serbia. His current research interests lie mainly around economic inequality, poverty, fiscal policy, taxation, social policies, labour rights, as well as financial crises and post-crises recoveries. Previously, he has done research on monetary policy, credit activity, exchange rates, trade, FDI, remittances, current account sustainability, forecasting, house prices. He has been adviser to the Minister of Finance of North Macedonia between 2017 and 2019 and researcher at the Central Bank of North Macedonia between 2007 and 2015. He has a PhD from University of Rome “Tor Vergata”.
