The 62-year-old has reached the age for mandatory retirement from the bank.
"My last day will be March 31," he says.
He will turn his attention to full-time teaching at John Hopkins University, where he has run a graduate course for the past 20 years. "One of the ideas is to start a centre for economics and finance for emerging markets with Latin America being a centrepiece."
Garcia has been at the forefront of many of the IADB’s biggest incidents and initiatives. One of the most recent was in April 2004, when the bank issued its first bond denominated in the currency of a borrowing member country. The multilateral launched a three-year Mexican peso bond, raising Ps3 billion ($269 million).
Garcia says that the deal took three years to come to fruition because of the documentation and legal work involved. Initially, the bank considered doing its debut international bond in a Latin American currency in Chilean pesos but at the time the regulatory constraints in the Andean country proved too big an obstacle. Subsequently, the bank has done a local-currency deal in Chilean pesos as well as in Brazilian reais, Colombian pesos and Peruvian soles too.