Established in 2025, the Ramamurti Family Fund supports capacity-building initiatives in emerging markets, including South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Administered by AIB in coordination with the Emerging Markets SIG and AIB South Asia, the fund provides membership support, conference participation assistance, and recognition awards for scholars from lower-income countries. This fund is structured to help strengthen global access to international business scholarship and foster deeper engagement across emerging regions.
We asked AIB Fellow Ravi Ramamurti to provide further insights into the importance of these initiatives and their connection to our association’s overarching mission.
If you would like to support similar causes through a donation of your own, you can do so when renewing your AIB membership or by using our online donation form.
What motivated the gift to AIB which established the Ramamurti Family Fund?
Two factors. First, I have benefited so much over the years from AIB’s community of scholars. The annual meetings have provided wonderful opportunities to learn from and connect with colleagues at other schools. Second, I believe AIB can do for IB education what the World Bank has done for economic development, that is, act as a global cross-pollinator of ideas, a node through which best practices and knowledge can flow from North to South, South to South, and South to North. The need and potential here are boundless. The same considerations motivated me to found the Center for Emerging Markets at Northeastern University in 2007.
Many years back I asked AIB Fellow Jag Sheth why he created the Sheth Foundation. I hope he won’t mind my paraphrasing and sharing his answer, which was that while his family was not particularly wealthy, they wanted to do something to help junior scholars. That thought has stuck with me.
How can AIB strengthen IB research and teaching in emerging economies?
Emerging markets are grossly underrepresented in AIB membership, even though they account for 85% of the world’s population. The building blocks to fix this imbalance are already in place, e.g. the Emerging Markets SIG, and the regional AIB boards for South Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and so on, all of which are led by highly motivated leaders. They put in hours of voluntary effort to create research and teaching workshops, connect with schools in emerging markets, and enlist new members. The participating instructors and mentors also donate their time. It only takes a little bit of long-term funding to turbo-charge these initiatives and multiply their impact over time.
What role has AIB played in your professional journey?
AIB has been my intellectual home for more than four decades. I first attended AIB’s annual meeting in the early 1980s and have been a regular since. In the 1980s and 1990s, when other US associations were quite US-centric, AIB was hospitable to scholars interested in developing countries. AIB stalwarts such as Ray Vernon, Lou Wells, Yair Aharoni, and Don Lessard encouraged my work on international business issues in developing countries, a lot of which was on state-owned enterprises and privatization in countries like Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, India, Mexico, South Korea, and Sri Lanka. I leveraged consulting for the World Bank, USAID, UNDP, etc. to gain access to companies and policymakers and to fund travel to these countries. In the 1990s, even in AIB, papers on these topics were typically scheduled on the last day of the conference! But today, as we all know, research on emerging markets figures prominently at AIB meetings.
