Jean Drèze

Jean Drèze
Born 1959 (age 52–53)
Belgium
Residence New Delhi, India
Nationality Indian
Occupation Development economist

Jean Drèze (born 1959) is a development economist who has been influential in Indian economic policymaking.[1] He is a naturalized Indian[2] of Belgian origin. His work in India include issues like hunger, famine, gender inequality, child health and education, and the NREGA. He had conceptualised and drafted the first version of the NREGA.

His co-authors include Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen, with whom he has written on famine, and Nicholas Stern, with whom he has written on policy reform when market prices are distorted. He is currently an honorary Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, and Senior Professor at the G. B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad. He is a member of the National Advisory Council of India in both first and second term.[3]

Contents

Early life

Jean Drèze is from a prominent Belgian academic family. His father is the economist Jacques Drèze, founder, the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, at the Université catholique de Louvain.[4]

He studied Mathematical Economics at the University of Essex and did his PhD (Economics) at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.[5] His brother, Xavier Drèze, is a marketing professor at UCLA.

Career

Jean Drèze taught at the London School of Economics and the Delhi School of Economics, and had been Visiting Professor at the G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad. Presently, he is an Honorary Chair Professor of the "Planning and Development Unit" created by the Planning Commission, Government of India, in the Department of Economics, University of Allahabad, Allahabad, India. He has made wide-ranging contributions to development economics and public economics, with special reference to India.

He has worked on many issues relating to development economics including hunger, famine, education, gender inequality, childcare, school feeding, employment guarantee etc. His works combine standard economic methods (such as his articles relating to poverty in India) and tools that are used more commonly by anthropologists (such as his work on the village of Palanpur, Moradabad District, Uttar Pradesh, India with Nicholas Stern, Peter Lanjouw and others, which included him living for a period in village under the same conditions as local people, farming a plot of land and keeping animals as recounted with Naresh Sharma in the article "Sharecropping in a North Indian Village", Journal of Development Studies, Oct. 1996). The combination of extensive field work and qualitative analysis of everyday life and poverty, along with quantitative work makes his work distinctive in the field of economics. He uniquely brings to the table is extensive fieldwork — few economists live as much in the country's villages — combined with outstanding analytical skills.[6]

It is not coincidence that Amartya Sen coauthored on a number of major publications on India, given his unique contacts with the grassroots and has even remarked that the "agreeable thing" about working with Dreze is that "he does most of the work and I get most of the credit".

PROBE Report

A key work widely cited that Dreze worked on as part of a small team was the primary education study of key states in northern India typically referred to by its short name, The PROBE Report, or The Public Report on Basic Education (1999). It remains a key reference due to the lack of similarly comprehensive studies using grassroots development specialists.

He has lived in India since 1979 and became an Indian citizen in 2002.

Social activism

Apart from academic work he has been actively involved in many social movements including the peace movement, the Right to Information campaign that led to the Right to Information Act in India, the Right to Food campaign in India,[7] among others.

During the 1990-1991 Iraq War, he joined a peace camp stationed on the Iraq-Kuwait border. His 1992 article with Haris Gazdar, "Hunger and Poverty in Iraq, 1991", was one of the first assessments of Iraq's economy after the Gulf war, and an early warning about the potential human costs of the Iraq sanctions. Another book that came out of Iraq is War and Peace in the Gulf, edited by Bela Bhatia, Jean Dreze and Kathy Kelly.

See also

Publications

Recent articles on NREGA

References

  1. ^ Sharma, Amol (8 June 2010). "India's “Are You Poor?” Survey". The Wall Street Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/06/08/indias-are-you-poor-survey/. 
  2. ^ http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2708/stories/20100423270801000.htm
  3. ^ http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100606/jsp/frontpage/story_12534964.jsp
  4. ^ http://www.core.ucl.ac.be
  5. ^ http://www.econdse.org/faculty/Dreze/dreze.htm
  6. ^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234451
  7. ^ "Mid-day meals for schoolkids must", Times of India, 12 November 2002, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/28003100.cms .

External links