Paul Isbell

Paul Isbell is director of the Energy Program at the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies (Real Instituto Elcano) in Madrid, Spain’s premier international affairs think tank, as well as the institute’s senior analyst for international economics and trade. As of the autumn 2008, he is based in Washington, D.C., where he is representing the institute (on U.S.-Spain relations and energy issues) in the CSIS Europe and Americas Programs. He is also a visiting senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue. Before joining the Elcano Royal Institute in 2002, Mr. Isbell was an analyst for emerging markets and currencies, with a focus on Latin America, at the Madrid-based investment bank of Banco Santander. During the 1990s, he was also a professor of economics and international political economy at a number of Spanish and American universities, including the University of Alcala de Henares, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Colegio Universitario de Estudios Financieros, Syracuse University, and the George Washington University. During the 1980s, he worked as an economist in the London office of National Economics Research Associates and at the Academy for Educational Development in Washington, D.C.

Currently, Mr. Isbell teaches energy economics and geopolitics at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid and emerging market economics at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires. His areas of interest include international economics, currencies, energy economics and geopolitics, as well as the political economy of emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Mr. Isbell received his B.S.F.S. from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and his M.A. from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he studied under a Rotary International Foundation fellowship. He collaborates frequently with the Spanish and international press.