Kaushik Basu

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Kaushik Basu

Born January 9, 1952
Residence USA
Nationality Indian
Fields Economics
Institutions Cornell University
Alma mater London School of Economics
Doctoral advisor Amartya Sen

Kaushik Basu (born January 9, 1952) is an Indian economist. He is the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics and Director, Program on Comparative Economic Development at Cornell University. He was born in Calcutta and received his early education there, at St. Xavier's School. In 1969 he moved to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics from St. Stephen's College and then he went on to the London School of Economics, from where he received his M.Sc. (Econ) in 1974 and PhD in 1976. He did his Ph.D. under the supervision of Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in the area of choice theory and welfare economics.

Over the years Kaushik Basu has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve) and the London School of Economics (where he was Distinguished Visitor in 1993); he has been Visiting Professor at MIT, Harvard and Princeton; and Visiting Scientist at the Indian Statistical Institute. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, Kaushik Basu has published scientific papers in development economics, game theory, industrial organization and political economy, and crafted the traveler's dilemma[1] He is a columnist for BBC News Online, and for the Times of India, and is the author of several books on economics and a play, Crossings at Benaras Junction, which was published in The Little Magazine (vol. 6, 2005). In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics (CDE) at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, and was the Centre's first Executive Director till 1996.

He is the editor of the Oxford Companion to Economics in India, published by Oxford University Press (February, 2007), which is a compendium on the Indian economy, with contributors that include P. Chidambaram (Finance Minister of India), Amartya Sen, and leading industrialists Ratan Tata, and N.R. Narayana Murthy. Kaushik Basu is Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, Associate Editor of Japanese Economic Review and is on the Board of Editors of the World Bank Economic Review.

In 2008, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country's highest civil honors.

[edit] Books

  • Revealed Preference of Government, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
  • The Less Developed Economy: A Critique of Contemporary Theory, Basil Blackwell, 1984.
  • Agrarian Structure and Economic Development, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. This book is part of the series, Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics, edited by J. Lesourne and H. Sonnenschein.
  • Economic Graffiti: Essays for Everyone. Oxford University Press.  1991
  • Lectures in Industrial Organization Theory. Blackwell Publishers.  1992
  • (editor, with Pulin Nayak) Development Policy and Economic Theory, Oxford University Press, 1992.
  • (editor, with Mukul Majumdar and Tapan Mitra) Capital, Investment and Development, Basil Blackwell, 1993.
  • (editor) Agrarian Questions, Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • (editor, with Prasanta Pattanaik and Kotaro Suzumura) Development, Welfare and Ethics, Clarendon Press, 1995.
  • Of People, Of Places: Sketches from an Economist's Notebook. Oxford University Press.  1994.
  • (editor, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam) Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India's Secular Identity, Penguin paperback, New Delhi, 1996.
  • Analytical Development Economics. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02423-3.  1997.
  • Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics. Oxford University Press.  2000.
  • (editor) Readings in Political Economy, Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
  • (editor, with Henrik Horn, Lisa Roman and Judith Shapiro) International Labor Standards, Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
  • India's Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond, The MIT Press, 2004.
  • Collected Papers In Theoretical Economics, Volume 1: Development, Markets, And Institutions. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-566761-1.  2005.
  • Collected Papers In Theoretical Economics, Volume 2: Rationality, Games And Strategic Behaviour. Oxford University Press.  2005.
  • (editor) Oxford Companion to Economics in India, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kaushik Basu (May 1994). "The Traveler's Dilemma: Paradoxes of Rationality in Game Theory". American Economic Review 84 (2): 391 – 395. 

[edit] External reference

  • [1] Kaushik Basu's personal page
  • [2] Kaushik Basu's articles at BBC world
  • [3] - Globalization and Babool Gum