Karlygash Dairabayeva, PhD

Bretton Trade Advisors was founded by Karlygash Dairabayeva, PhD, a research leader with 15 years of experience managing multi-country research teams and designing structured methodologies for supply chain analysis, trade intelligence, and economic diagnostics.

Over a career at the World Bank Group spanning more than 20 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, she coordinated economists, sector specialists, and country-office staff to deliver rigorous analytical products on schedule — and co-authored more than 30 published reports, establishing the documentation standards and peer-review protocols behind them.

She co-developed the Global Value Chain module for the World Bank's WITS platform, constructing trade indicators that measure GVC participation across automotive, electronics, apparel, and metals sectors — an approach developed precisely because most countries lacked the input-output tables conventional analysis requires. The module is publicly available and used by researchers and policymakers worldwide.

Her work is defined by a talent for producing defensible findings in data-scarce environments: triangulating mirror data, corporate filings, customs databases, and industry sources into auditable, reproducible analysis. She was a core team member on the Connecting to Compete Logistics Performance Index — a global survey across 160+ countries with 100,000+ downloads and 1,500+ academic citations — and has presented and defended methodology before UN ministerial meetings, government officials, and executive audiences. Her work on trade and transport in landlocked developing countries has been cited by the World Economic Forum.