Economic Research Intern

About the Inter-American Development Bank Group

The IDB Group is a community of diverse, versatile, and passionate people dedicated to improving lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Employees find purpose and thrive in an inclusive, collaborative, agile, and rewarding environment.

About This Position

The IDB Group is seeking an active graduate student for a two-month paid internship under the Consultant modality. The 2026 Summer Internship Program offers a competitive opportunity for university students from member countries to gain professional experience and learn about development work and corporate management at the Bank. This position is based in the Headquarters.

Team and Responsibilities

You will be working within the Economics Team, part of the Country Department Caribbean Group (CCB). This department leads the IDB Group's engagement with its Caribbean member countries, guiding policy dialogue and overseeing the preparation, execution, and monitoring of country and regional strategies. It manages the design, processing, negotiation, and administration of both public-sector and private-sector operations, ensuring alignment with institutional priorities and country-specific development objectives.

As an Economic Research Intern, you will engage in two primary research projects:

• One project focuses on estimating country-specific models using high-frequency, real-time data to forecast quarterly economic growth in Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname with high accuracy. This involves leveraging state-of-the-art Nowcasting models developed with Machine Learning technologies.
• Another research project utilizes large language models (LLMs) to analyze the uptake of reforms following loans and other interventions.

What You’ll Do

• Assist in the data extraction automation of key macroeconomic indicators and process non-structured data in Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, identifying economic activity indicators from remote sensing and internet search data.
• Clean and prepare data for Nowcasting analysis of GDP across the six specified Caribbean countries, compiling it into a dataset ready for model application.
• Support project supervisors in training IDB staff and/or government personnel on the applications and use of nowcasting tools, including online overviews and code for data extraction automation.
• Work on a research study assessing the impact of reform processes in Caribbean countries, involving the running of Large Language Models (LLMs). This includes helping to train LLMs, assessing algorithms, and finding diverse data sources, particularly newspaper archives to complement Factiva with web-scrapable repositories.
• Review results (datasets, reports, narratives) generated by AI, conduct comparison exercises, and combine the mining and cleaning of structured data from public entities with semi-structured or non-structured data.

What You'll Need

Education

• Active graduate student in Economics, economic policy, data science, or similar fields from an accredited university. Graduation date must be after the internship period.
• Minimum of 50% of coursework completed for graduate students.

Languages

• Fluency in English is required.
• Working knowledge of one other Bank language (Spanish, French, or Portuguese) is a plus.

Key Skills

• Continuous learning
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Client focus
• Communication and influence
• Innovation and trying new things

Technical Skills

• Knowledge of large language models and AI tools.
• Proficiency in Python and R.
• Experience working with unstructured data and Nowcasting is preferred but not mandatory.

Requirements

• Citizenship: Must be a national of an IDB member country.
• Active Student: Enrolled in a graduate (master’s or Ph.D.) program as of the internship start date. Graduation date must be after the internship period.
• Consanguinity: No family members (up to fourth degree of consanguinity and second degree of affinity, including spouse) working at the IDB or IDB Invest.
• First Job at IDB Group: Must be a first-time participant in an Internship Program held by the Bank or IDB Invest, and not a former staff member, Complementary Workforce (CW), contractor, or service provider through any other contractual modality.
• Availability: Must be available to work full-time (40 hours per week) from June 16 to August 15, 2026. These dates are fixed and cannot be modified.

Key Skills/Competency

• Economic Forecasting
• Machine Learning
• Large Language Models (LLM)
• Python
• R
• Data Science
• Macroeconomic Analysis
• Unstructured Data
• Statistical Modeling
• International Development