In a rapidly changing policy environment the breadth of both DFID's work and, by implication, economists' work has broadened. Economists within DFID have a strong generalist background and, unlike other organisations such as the World Bank, they do not specialise. Economics is a cross-cutting discipline and, as such, economists apply their expertise to interventions in a range of sectors including, for example, finance, health, education and natural resources. The Economist Group consists of 80 economists who work in either geographic or policy divisions. Geographic economists work in multi-disciplinary teams and are involved in country level policy work and spending country aid programmes.
Economists also work on multilateral issues within the various departments.
Poverty Reduction and pro-poor policies. The Department has placed poverty elimination at the centre of its development strategy. A key issue for DFID is how to spend limited resources to have the maximum impact on poor people. The core of economics is making choices in the context of scarce resources and maximising efficiency. Economists can use their knowledge to help DFID make the best choices between competing uses of funds and to promote growth policies that are more likely to benefit the poor.