Kaushik Basu
Kaushik Basu (born 9 January 1952) is an Indian economist who is currently the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India[1] and is also the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics and, till recently, he was Chairman of the Department of Economics and Director, Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell University.
Early life
Kaushik Basu was born in Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta and schooled at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata. In 1969 he moved to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics (Honors), with Mathematics as subsidiary, from St. Stephen's College. He then went on to the London School of Economics, to do his M.Sc in Economics. After completing his M.Sc in 1974, he stayed on at the London School for his PhD, from 1974 to 1976.[2] He did his PhD on choice theory under the chairmanship of Amartya Sen.
Career
On completing his PhD from London, Basu lectured briefly at Reading University, and returned to India in 1977, to be Reader in Economics and, later, Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. Over the years 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. He is currently Chief Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Finance of the Government of India. He is on leave from Cornell University where he is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, Basu has published scientific papers in development economics, game theory, industrial organization, political economy and the economics of child labor,[3] and crafted the traveler's dilemma[4]
More recently, he has worked on aggregating infinite streams of returns, and the axiomatic structures, pertaining to inter-generational anonymity and different forms of the Pareto principle, that such aggregations can satisfy.
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.[5]
He is a columnist for BBC News Online, Hindustan Times, Business Standard 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). 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. His new book, Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics, was published in 2011 by Princeton University Press and Penguin, India, and is to be published shortly in translation in Italian, Chinese and Spanish.
He 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.
He is also the creator of the two-player board game Dui-doku.
Awards
In 2008, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country's highest civil honors.[6]
In 2011, he was awarded an honarary PhD by Lucknow University, Lucknow.
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, 1997, ISBN 0-262-02423-3.
- 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.
- (editor) India's Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond, The MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 0-262-02556-6.
- Collected Papers In Theoretical Economics, Volume 1: Development, Markets, And Institutions. Oxford University Press. 2005. ISBN 0-19-566761-1.
- 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.
- An Economist's Miscellany, Oxford University Press, 2011
Research Papers
- Isolate and Proximate Illiteracy, with James E. Foster and S. Subramaniam, Economic and Political Weekly, 2000
- India and the Global Economy, Economic and Political Weekly, 2001
- Is Literacy Shared Within Households? Theory and Evidence from Bangladesh, with Ambar Narayan and Martin Ravillion, 2001
- Stratergy for Economic Reform in West Bengal, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and Ashok Sanjar Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, 2002
- The Collective Model of the Household and an Unexpected Implication for Child Labor Hypothesis and an Empirical Test, with Ranjan Ray, 2002
- EMS and Partyless Panchayats, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and Ashok Sanjar Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, 2003
- Contract Farming, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and Ashok Sanjar Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, 2003
- New Empirical Development Economics, Economic and Political Weekly, 2005
- Beyond Nandigram: Industialisation in West Bengal, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and others, Economic and Political Weekly, 2007
- Practicality in Economics, Economic and Political Weekly, 2007
- India's Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Policymaking in a Globalised World, Economic and Political Weekly, 2008
- China and India: Idiosyncratic Paths to High Growth, Economic and Political Weekly, 2009
- The Economics of Foodgrain Management in India , 2010
- India's Foodgrain Policy: An Economic Theory Perspective, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011
- Understanding Inflation and Controlling it, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011
- Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a Bribe should be Treated as Legal, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011[7]
- The evolving dynamics of global economic power in the postcrisis world: Revelations from a new Index of Government Economic Power, with Kaushik Basu, Supriyo De, Rangeet Ghosh and Shweta[8]
- Strategic Theory for Central Banking: How to Influence Exchange Rates without Affecting Reserves, 2011[9]
References
External reference
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Basu, Kaushik |
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9 January 1952 |
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