Dr Greta Seibel is an LSE Fellow in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She teaches DV400 - Development: History, Theory and Policy. Greta is an economic historian who draws insights from political economy, history, anthropology and sociology. Her wider research interests include industrial policies, state-led development and the Asian growth miracle.

Her current research project explores small business credit and bridging the gap towards financial inclusion in Indonesia. She investigates the emergence of subsidised SME credit programmes and the shift to market-led finance with market rates of interest on savings and loans. The second component of the project takes a comparative approach to understand Indonesia’s missing middle in its firm-size distribution. In this she explores the question of the missing middle in the Indonesian manufacturing sector despite the New Order government’s objective to strengthen small enterprises and analyses the main barriers to growth using data on number of firms, workers, value added and main business constraints from Economic Census data. The project takes a comparative lens with South Korea and Taiwan, two Tiger economies pursuing similar industrial developmental models with distinct firm-size distributions.

This project builds on her doctoral research, which explored the missing middle in Indonesian firm-size distribution and credit gap during the New Order period and the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis (1966-2006). She holds a PhD in Economic History and MSc in Political Economy of Late Development from the London School of Economics, and a BA in European Studies from Maastricht University.  

In her previous capacity as a Junior Expert for the South Asia Regional Office of the German NGO Welthungerhilfe Greta used a rights-based approach towards achieving food security with community providers, working towards strengthening decentralisation and improving accountability at the local and international levels. She has also previously taught at SOAS. 

Greta speaks German, Dutch and Indonesian.