Keith was employed as an economist in the International Monetary Fund for nearly 30 years where he gained extensive experience working on economic and financial development issues. His expertise includes economic analysis, drafting policy and technical assistance reports, and providing guidance on the institutional arrangements for compiling macroeconomic statistics. After working as a country economist in a number of regional departments, Keith headed up the Government Finance Statistics Division in the Statistics Department of the IMF that is responsible for ensuring the methodological soundness of the fiscal data that are published and used by member-countries of the IMF for policy formulation and analysis. Keith also worked in close collaboration with representatives from international and regional standard-setting agencies (such as Eurostat, OECD) to develop international methodological standards for the reporting of data on government operations.
Keith was also actively involved in implementing aspects of the IMF’s technical assistance program in statistics that focused on building institutional capacity at the country level to improve the availability, coverage, and quality of fiscal data. In this connection, he led multisector technical-assistance missions to several countries, including Bosnia, Seychelles, Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago, Kosovo, Niger, and Iran. After leaving the IMF in 2009, Keith worked as a consultant for the Fiscal and Municipal Management Division of the Institutional Capacity and Finance Sector at the Inter-American Development Bank where he provided assistance on the implementation of a framework for harmonizing fiscal data at subnational levels of government in several Latin American countries.
Keith, who holds a B.A. in Economics from Manchester University (UK) and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois, began his professional career as an economist in the Research Department of the bank of Guyana.