Abel Aganbegyan was born on 8 October 1932 in Tiflis, Soviet Union (now Tbilisi, Georgia). An economist of Armenian descent, he is currently the Rector of the Academy of the National Economy in Moscow. He was one of Mikhail Gorbachev's chief economic advisors and among the first influential Soviet economists to voice the need for a restructuring of the economic and business infrastructure of the Soviet Union.