Washington  - US president-elect Barack Obama announced Wednesday that he was establishing an advisory board to help lead the country out of the economic crisis and named a former chairman of the Federal Reserve to head it.

Paul Volcker will head the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which will be tasked with coming up with ideas for creating jobs and stabilizing the financial system, Obama said. The board will offer independent and non-partisan analysis of the economic crisis and formulate ideas for reversing the trend.

Volcker, 81, served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. The board is modelled after the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by former president Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s for assessing the performance of US spy agencies.

"Those who serve in Washington don't always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working for people and businesses and which aren't," Obama said at a press conference in Chicago.

"This board will provide that fresh perspective to me and my administration with an infusion of ideas from across the country and from all sectors of our economy," he said.

Obama also named Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, to serve as the new board's chief economist and as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. (dpa)