Development Economics - Prominent Development Economists

Prominent Development Economists

• Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 2005 Clark Medal winner.
• Philippe Aghion, professor of economics at Harvard University, co-authored textbook in economic growth, forwarded Schumpeterian growth, and established creative destruction theories mathematically with Peter Howitt (economist).
• Sabina Alkire, Head of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford.
• Jagdish Bhagwati, a frequent commentator on international trade and noted supporter of free trade
• Pranab Bardhan, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, author of texts in both trade and development economics, and editor of the Journal of Development Economics from 1985-2003.
• Peter Thomas Bauer, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, author of Dissent on Development.
• Abhijit Banerjee, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
• Kaushik Basu, professor of economics at Cornell University and author of Analytical Development Economics.
• David E. Bloom
• Ha-Joon Chang, author of Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans; Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World which use historical evidence to critique neoliberal development economics.
• Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion which attempts to tie together a series of traps to explain the self-fulfilling nature of poverty at the lower end of the development scale.
• Esther Duflo, Director of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009 MacArthur Fellow, 2010 Clark Medal winner, advocate for field experiments.
• William Easterly, author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics description and review and White Man's Burden: How the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (description and preview).
• Celso Furtado, Brazilian structuralist economist.
• Oded Galor, Israeli-American economist at Brown University; editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Growth, the principal journal in economic growth. Developer of the unified growth theory, the newest alternative to theories of endogenous growth.
• Yujiro Hayami (economist)
• Peter Howitt (economist), Canadian economist at Brown University; past president of the Canadian Economics Association, introduced the concept of Schumpeterian growth and established creative destruction theory mathematically with Philippe Aghion.
• Nurul Islam (economist)
• W. Arthur Lewis, with T. W. Schultz, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Economics for work in development economics.
• Raúl Prebisch, founding Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and influential dependency theorist
• Lant Pritchett, professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and has held several prominent research positions at the World Bank.
• Dani Rodrik, professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, has written extensively on globalization.
• Walt Whitman Rostow, modernization theorist, author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto
• Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time (preview) and Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
• Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner, author of Development as Freedom.
• Hans Singer, who dealt with how unequal terms of trade disproportionately affect producers of primary products. His thesis, combined with the work of Raúl Prebisch, form the basis for dependency theory
• Hernando de Soto Polar, proponent of property rights in the developing world, author of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
• Frances Stewart, current president of the Human Development and Capability Association.
• Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist at the World Bank.
• Lance Taylor is the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development and Director of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School, NY. He has published widely in the areas of macroeconomics, development economics, and economic theory. His most recent book is Reconstructing Macroeconomics: Structuralist Proposals and Critiques of the Mainstream (Harvard University Press, 2003). In addition to these activities, he has been a visiting scholar or policy adviser in more than 25 countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, Egypt, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and Thailand.
• Erik Thorbecke, a co-originator of Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measure who also played a significant role in the development and popularization of Social Accounting Matrix.
• Robert M. Townsend, professor at MIT known for his Thai Project, a model for many other applied and theoretical projects in economic development.
• Mahbub ul Haq, creator of the Human Development Report
• David N.Weil, American economist known for his economics growth textbook and his reinterpretation of Malthus.
• Muhammed Yunus, Nobel Prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank