4 Indians among world's top business thinkers

Four Indian business thinkers have been featured in America's Foreign Policy Magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers list.

The list also features few other Indians and people of Indian origin such as author Pankaj Mishra and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Burmese pro-democracy leader and Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi tops the list which also include Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton among others.

Let's have a look at some of the top business thinkers in the world.

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Bill Gates

Bill Gates is an American business magnate and philanthropist. Gates is the former chief executive and current chairman of Microsoft, the world's largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen. He is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people.

During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder, with 6.4 per cent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.

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Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke is an American economist and currently chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke has overseen the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis.

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Mario Draghi

Mario Draghi is an Italian banker and economist who succeeded Jean-Claude Trichet as President of the European Central Bank on November 1, 2011. He was previously the governor of the Bank of Italy from January 2006 until October 2011.

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George Soros

George Soros is a Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros supports progressive-liberal causes. He is known as 'The Man Who Broke the Bank of England' because of his $1 billion in investment profits during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.

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Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who specialises in the study of economic inequality. From late 2006 to early 2007, he was the first head of the Paris School of Economics, after spending three years creating it.

He quickly left, however, due to his support for Segolene Royal in the French presidential campaign, and according to him, following a decision he had taken previously. Piketty has been back teaching at the Paris School of Economics since 2007.

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Christine Lagarde

Christine Lagarde is a French lawyer and Union for a Popular Movement politician who has been the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund since July 5, 2011. Previously, she held various ministerial posts in the French government: she was Minister of Economic Affairs, Finances and Industry and before that Minister of Agriculture and Fishing and Minister of Trade in the government of Dominique de Villepin.

Lagarde was the first woman ever to become finance minister of a G8 economy, and is the first woman to ever head the IMF.

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Willem Buiter

Willem Buiter is a Dutch-born American economist, also of British nationality, who is chief economist at Citigroup. He has served as chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, and as an advisor and consultant for a number of national governments and private financial enterprises.

He has held academic appointments at universities in the US, the UK and the Netherlands.

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Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer is an American business executive. She is the current president and CEO of Yahoo. Previously, she was a long-time executive and key spokesperson for Google.

She is the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and has been ranked number 14 on the list of America's most powerful businesswomen of 2012 by Fortune magazine.

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Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is an American businesswoman. She has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. In June 2012, she was also elected to the board of directors by the existing board members, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. Before Facebook, Sandberg was Vice-President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.

She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.

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Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is an American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography.

According to the prize Committee, the prize was given for Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

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Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is an American economist. He anticipated the collapse of the United States housing market and the worldwide recession which started in 2008 and ended in 2009.

He teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business and is the chairman of Roubini Global Economics, an economic consultancy firm.

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Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is widely considered the most successful investor of the 20th century. Buffet is the primary shareholder, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people.

He was ranked as the world's wealthiest person in 2008 and as the third wealthiest person in 2011. In 2012, American magazine Time named Buffett one of the most influential people in the world.

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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a globally renowned Nigerian economist best known for her two terms as Finance Minister of Nigeria (her current position) and for her work at the World Bank, including several years as one of its Managing Directors (October 2007-July 2011). She briefly held the position of Foreign Minister of Nigeria in 2006.

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Martin Feldstein

Martin Feldstein is an American economist. He is currently the George F Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and the president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the NBER from 1978 through 2008. From 1982 to 1984, Feldstein served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan (where his deficit hawk views clashed with Reagan administration economic policies).

He has also been a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body the Group of Thirty since 2003.

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Mohamed El-Erian

Mohamed El-Erian is the CEO and co-CIO of Pimco, a global investment management firm and one of the world's largest bond investors with about $1.9 trillion of assets under management as of September 1, 2012.

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Ruchir Sharma

Ruchir Sharma is a Managing Director and the head of the Emerging Markets Equity team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Ruchir, who has a passion for writing, wrote the book, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles in April 2012, which has since become an international best seller.

Ruchir had been a contributing editor with Newsweek and his op-eds frequently appear in The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times and Foreign Affairs.

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Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist who serves as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. He also serves as Eric J Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

Rajan is also a visiting professor for the World Bank, Federal Reserve Board, and Swedish Parliamentary Commission.

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Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. In 1999, Wadhwa was named a 'leader of tomorrow' by Forbes magazine.

In February 2012, Wadhwa was one of the six '2012 Outstanding American by Choice' recipients, a distinction awarded by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

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Raj Chetty

Raj Chetty is an Indian American economist. He is currently a professor of economics at Harvard University and was a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was offered tenure at the age of 28 and accepted at 29, becoming one of the youngest people to do so in the history of Harvard's economics department.

Chetty has published a number of papers in prestigious journals, including American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of Political Economy. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

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Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Sri Mulyani Indrawati is an Indonesian economist. In June 2010 she was appointed the Managing Director of the World Bank Group, and resigned as Finance Minister of Indonesia in the Second United Indonesia Cabinet.

As Indonesian finance minister from 2005 to 2010, Sri Mulyani was known as a tough reformist and was largely credited with strengthening Indonesia's economy, increasing investments and steering Southeast Asia's largest economy through the 2007-10 financial crisis.

In 2011, she was ranked as the 65th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine.