From India to Georgia State: Ph.D. Student Meghna Paul Advances Public Finance

ATLANTA — In countries around the world, debates about how to fund schools, hospitals and other local services often come down to seemingly simple questions: Who controls the money? Who is accountable for how it is spent?

For Meghna Paul, a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State, those questions are at the heart of her research on public financial management and fiscal decentralization. While splitting her time between teaching and writing her dissertation, Paul also works with the Andrew Young School’s Public Finance Research Cluster (PFRC), which provides research, technical assistance and training in applied public finance. These projects run the gamut from state and local finance in Georgia to nationwide intergovernmental restructuring in Mozambique.

Her professional journey began thousands of miles away, poring over line items in government budgets inside India’s Ministry of Finance.

“Working inside government taught me that how we design budget systems is just as important as how much money we spend,” Paul said. “That realization has shaped many aspects of my career.”

Paul’s academic path into public policy started with economics. After completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in economics in India, she secured an internship at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, a think tank associated with the Ministry of Finance. Under the mentorship of Rathin Roy, one of India’s leading public finance scholars, she learned how budget analysis has real consequences for policy decisions — whether a program reaches its intended target, whether a social initiative is sustainable or how tradeoffs across sectors play out in practice.

That experience sparked a lasting interest in the relationship among budget allocations, financial management systems and government effectiveness. She went on to roles at another New Delhi think tank focused on social welfare programs and later with the state government of West Bengal, her home state. Across these positions, she encountered the same lesson: Greater local autonomy and strong financial monitoring could be just as transformative as increasing funding.

After several years working on applied public finance projects, Paul realized she wanted a stronger theoretical and quantitative foundation to support independent research, and a doctoral program became the obvious next step.

As she worked on fiscal decentralization in India, she repeatedly consulted reports by GSU scholars, including Jorge Martinez-Vazquez and Roy Bahl from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Their work offered rigorous theory as well as practical relevance. When she learned that the Andrew Young School was ranked among the top programs in the United States for public finance and that the Department of Public Management and Policy (PMAP) included prolific scholars such as Can Chen and Benedict Jimenez, GSU quickly moved to the top of her list.

“I wanted to be in a place where public finance wasn’t on the margins but was a core part of the program,” Paul said. “GSU’s reputation and PFRC’s applied projects made it feel like the right fit.”

Since joining the PMAP Ph.D. program and the PFRC as a public finance fellow, Paul has been building the kind of toolkit she hoped to create. Approaching questions through formal theoretical frameworks instead of practical intuition initially required time and persistence, but that shift fundamentally changed how she designs research questions and interprets evidence.

Chen, an associate professor of public management and policy and Paul’s adviser, has played a key role in that transition. He has helped her refine research ideas, connected her with scholars at conferences and guided her through the inevitable false starts that come with doctoral work. As an international student and a former full-time practitioner, Paul values having an adviser who is accomplished, worldly and approachable.

At the PFRC, Paul has also been able to contribute to research that directly impacts policymaking. Working on state government projects related to fiscal evaluations has deepened her understanding of state-level public finance systems and allowed her to see how technical analysis informs budget decisions. As an international student, the PFRC has also provided a valuable introduction into how the U.S. budgeting process works in practice, giving her exposure to institutions and procedures that have enriched her comparative perspective. Her PFRC work on a fiscal decentralization project in Mozambique has broadened that perspective further.

This experience has reinforced the interdisciplinary approach that first drew her to the PFRC, connecting economics, political science and public policy to address complex governance challenges.

“At PFRC, I can see the full cycle from big theoretical questions about decentralization to the nuts and bolts of how a ministry or state agency will use the results,” she said. “That’s incredibly motivating.”

Paul’s scholarship has already received national recognition. She earned the Best Poster Presentation Award at the 2023 Association for Budgeting and Financial Management (ABFM) conference. Such conference presentations have helped her sharpen her ideas, build a professional network and stay current with emerging work across the field. The PMAP Department and the PFRC have reinforced that growth through conference funding and by actively encouraging students to present their work.

Paul was also selected as a Founders Fellow by the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) for 2025, and most recently received the Ronald Coase Fellowship.

Wherever her career leads next — academia, international organizations or government advisory roles — Paul is committed to using public finance as a lever for better governance. In a world grappling with questions of equity, fiscal sustainability and the capacity of local governments, her work could not be timelier.