Research Interests

Braithwaite has been a Senior Economist at the World Bank, most recently in the Social Protection Group, Human Development Network, where she worked on social protection, disability, and poverty issues. She specializes in the study of medium-income Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, and Mauritius), Turkey, and the former Soviet Union (FSU), and has provided policy advice to governments while on negotiating missions and staff visits. She has written many Bank reports, including poverty assessments for Turkey, Russia, Armenia, Moldova, Hungary, and Ukraine. In addition, she has operational experience in Cambodia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Jamaica, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Turkmenistan. Braithwaite also worked for the International Monetary Fund and the US Census Bureau. Braithwaite speaks excellent Russian, adequate Spanish, survival Turkish and beginning Hungarian, and reads French. She teaches courses on development, the international financial institutions, macroeconomic policy, and public policy. She has also taught at Georgetown, George Mason, American, Maryland and Kalamazoo College. An alumna of the University of Virginia, she served as a Resident Assistant while enrolled and was both an Echols Scholar and a member of the Raven Society. She went on to earn her master's degree in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown and her doctorate in economics at Duke University.

Braithwaite's current research is on orphanhood and government transfers in Botswana and Swaziland, following up on work on same in South Africa. Transfers are called "welfare" in the US, "social assistance" in Europe, and "social grants" in Southern Africa. She and a team of research assistants are looking at ways that Southern African governments can help people affected by HIV/AIDS, focusing on the most vulnerable—the orphans. Her work involves the use of household datasets for quantitative assessment of how well government transfers are reaching the poor in these countries.