Mike Soto-Class founded the Center for a New Economy (CNE) in 1998, and since then has steered CNE into becoming one of the most credible and influential voices in Puerto Rico. Beginning in 2014, CNE has been recognized yearly as one of the Top Think-Tanks to Watch by the Global Think Tank Report of the University of Pennsylvania.
With offices in San Juan, Washington, D.C. and Madrid, CNE is Puerto Rico’s first think tank, and has evolved into a powerful nonpartisan advocate on behalf of the island in policy circles as well as an important participant of diaspora and Latino groups in the U.S. mainland.
CNE’s policy papers are regularly sought-out by officials in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the White House, intent on receiving balanced expertise and policy counsel on Puerto Rico and finding bipartisan options to the challenges faced by the island. CNE’s reports and analyses are also regularly covered by media from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and are cited by numerous academic and policy publications.
Mike was an editor of The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth, which was published by the Brookings Institution in 2006 and selected that same year as a Notable Book by the American Library Association. He has been a columnist for El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest circulation daily, since 2003, and was the host of a weekly news radio program on economics at Radio Universidad in the University of Puerto Rico for several years.
Mike served as an Advisory Board member of the Community Innovator’s Lab at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts; as a Board member of Endeavor Puerto Rico, a non-profit with an international reach committed to supporting high-impact entrepreneurs; as a Trustee of the University Press of the University of Puerto Rico; as the Founding Chairman of Espacios Abiertos, an organization dedicated to growing civic capacity and promoting transparency in Puerto Rico; a member of the YouthSave Advisory Board at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.; and as Co-Chair of Re-Imagina, the Advisory Commission for a Resilient Puerto Rico. In 2008, he was selected as an Aspen Institute Ideas Fellow.
He currently serves as Yale Alumni Schools Director for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and as the Puerto Rico Delegate to the Yale Alumni Association, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Baldwin School of Puerto Rico, and an Emeritus Member of the Advisory Council for the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico.
Mike has a B.A. from Yale University and a Juris Doctor from Vanderbilt University.
Publications by Miguel A. Soto-Class