Atanas Pekanov is a Bulgarian macroeconomist who served as Deputy Prime Minister for the Management of European Funds in the caretaker governments of Stefan Yanev (2021) and Galab Donev (2022–2023), with a focus on Bulgaria’s Recovery and Resilience Plan and other EU-funded programs.
He has been working as a researcher on macroeconomic and financial issues in Vienna since 2017 as a senior economist at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research. At the same time, he teaches as a lecturer and successfully defended his PhD in economics at the Vienna University of Business and Economics, researching household consumption and finances in Europe.
Before that, he studied at University College London. As part of his PhD, he won a Fulbright scholarship, spending the academic year 2019 at the Harvard University Faculty of Economics, where he studied with Ludwig Straub, the current winner of the medal for the best young economist in the world (Clarke Medal).
He has also received awards and scholarships from the Austrian Economic Association, the Bulgarian National Bank, and the Schmidt Fund. He has worked at the European Central Bank.
As an expert, he has worked on monetary policy topics as a member of the Monetary Policy Dialogue at the European Parliament and on the EU budget (MFF) issues for the European Commission. Most recently, he contributed to the Florence Report - a publication by the EMU Lab at the European University Institute on the future of Europe.
