Nenad Popovic was a Serbia-born American leading economic expert who defected in 1961 to teach and write in exile at Syracuse University.
Background
Nenad Dusan Popovic born on June 17, 1909, in Srem Mitrovica, Serbia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nenad was the youngest of nine children born to Serbian Orthodox landowners. During World War I the Popovic family was evacuated to Vukovar by the Austro-Hungarian army, which was then at war with Serbia.
Education
Nenad attended Belgrade University, graduating with a law degree in 1932.
Popovic started a career as a banker and banking writer during the period of political turmoil between the world wars. First, he worked as a research assistant at the National Bank of Yugoslavia (now National Bank of Serbia) from 1930 till 1937. For the next 3 years, he held the same position at Chartered Agrarian Bank.
During the World War II, Popovic spent most of the time as a German prisoner, only to be shunned by the Communists because of his bourgeois upbringing. So, from 1945 till 1946, he served as a director of Yugoslav War Reparation Board.
In 1946 Popovic began four years as vice president of the State Planning Commission of Serbia. In the 1950s he held executive positions at the International Monetary Fund and the National Bank of Yugoslavia. His work with the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs began in 1955, followed by a stint as assistant secretary of state with the Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Trade. He returned to Foreign Affairs before his defection. Once in the United States, he joined the faculty at Syracuse University, where he taught comparative classes on socialist and western economies. He became professor emeritus in 1975 but continued to teach until the mid-1980s.