Before DfID, Dercon was a Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University, and the lead academic for the Ethiopia country programme at the International Growth Centre, which is a research centre based jointly at The London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford.

Prior to this, between 1993 and 2000, he was a tenured professor of development economics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

[5] Dercon studied at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), where he obtained a BPhil degree in 1985 and a Licentiate in Economics in 1986.

He subsequently received an MPhil in 1988 and a DPhil degree in 1992, both in Economics from the University of Oxford.

His research as focused on a range of subjects including: Together with political economist Chris Blattman he ran a randomized controlled trial in Ethiopia that investigated the impact of low-skill industrial jobs on the welfare of the workers.