Dr. Richard Jolly is Senior Research Fellow at The CUNY Graduate Center and Co-director of the UN Intellectual History Project.  He is special adviser to the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and architect of the widely-acclaimed Human Development Report.  Before this, he served for fourteen years as deputy executive director for Programmes in UNICEF.  In UNICEF, he was directly involved in efforts to ensure more attention to the needs of children and women in the making of economic adjustment policies, along the lines set out in the book he co-edited volume entitled, Adjustment with a Human Face.  He has been much concerned with reform and collaboration in the United Nations.

Before joining the United Nations, Dr. Jolly was for nine years director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.  In 1978, on secondment from IDS, he acted as special consultant on North-South issues to the Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  From 1978 to 1981, he was a member and rapporteur of the United Nations' Committee on Development Planning.  From 1987 to 1996, Dr. Jolly was chairman of the Society for International Development (SID) North/South Roundtable and vice president of the Society from 1982 to 1985.  Dr. Jolly received his degree in economics from the University of Cambridge in 1956, and he earned his doctorate subsequently from Yale University.

Publications to which he has contributed include: Development with a Human Face (1998); Adjustment with a Human Face (1987); The UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions: New Challenges for the Twenty-First Century  (1995); Disarmament and World Development (1984); and Planning Education for African Development (1969).