Pietro Veglio

Pietro Veglio was a Swiss economist and development official who spent more than five decades in international cooperation, from Swiss technical aid in Latin America to the board of the World Bank and the leadership of Ticino's NGO federation. He was born in 1944 in Bellinzona, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, and died on 28 September 2026 at the age of 81.

He studied at the University of Fribourg. In 1969 he joined the Technical Cooperation Service of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the forerunner of today's Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC, or DSC in Italian and French). From early in his career he focused on Latin America. In 1978 the department posted him to Bolivia, and further assignments followed in Peru and Ecuador. From 1989 to 1992 he headed the Latin America division of the Development Cooperation Directorate in Bern.

He then moved into the multilateral system. He served as deputy director at the Inter-American Development Bank until about 1992. From 1992 to 1997 he advised the Swiss Executive Director at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and later worked as an expert in the Bank's evaluation division. In November 1998 he became director of that evaluation division. He also worked on OECD country examinations for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In July 2001 the Swiss Federal Council named him Swiss Executive Director at the World Bank, succeeding Matthias Meyer. Contemporary accounts place him in that role from about 2001 to 2002 onward, representing Switzerland and a constituency that included Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Serbia and Montenegro, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. After leaving full-time Bank service he taught as a visiting professor in St. Gallen, Lugano and Italy, passing on what he had learned about development policy and the fight against poverty.

Closer to home he chaired the Federazione delle ONG della Svizzera italiana (FOSIT), the federation of Italian-speaking Swiss NGOs, from 2011 to 2019, then became its honorary president. Colleagues remembered a voluntary decade of work that helped FOSIT grow into a recognised voice for cooperation in Ticino. RSI's Alphaville programme and Corriere del Ticino and Ticinonline obituaries in late September 2026 recalled an economist dedicated to development policy and to the Italian-speaking Swiss NGO community. A cause of death was not made public.