Economist names first woman editor

Zanny Minton Beddoes, the business affairs editor of The Economist, has been named the editor of the weekly business magazine, the first female at the top spot of the 172-year-old publication.

She replaces John Micklethwait, who is leaving to become editor in chief of Bloomberg LP. She will start on Feb. 2.

“I am delighted to be given the opportunity to edit The Economist,” she said in a statement. “It is one of journalism’s great institutions, with an extraordinarily talented staff.”

She is currently responsible for the newspaper’s coverage of business, finance and science.  Prior to this role, she was The Economist’s economics editor, overseeing the newspaper’s global economics coverage from her base in Washington.

Before moving to Washington in April 1996, Minton Beddoes was The Economist’s emerging-markets correspondent based in London. She traveled extensively in Latin America and Eastern Europe, writing editorials and country analyses. She has written surveys of the World Economy, Latin American finance, global finance and Central Asia.

Minton Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programs in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the minister of finance in Poland, as part of a small group headed by professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University.

Minton Beddoes has written extensively about international financial issues including enlargement of the European Union, the future of the International Monetary Fund and economic reform in emerging economies. She has published in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, contributed chapters to several conference volumes and, in 1997, edited “Emerging Asia,” a book on the future of emerging-markets in Asia, published by the Asian Development Bank.

In May 1998 she testified before Congress on the introduction of the Euro.