Stockholm, Oct 08: The theories of how countries maintain global
trade, why natural rates of unemployment are driven by economic
necessity and even `Ricardian equivalence,` which dictates that
governments cannot increase demand by deficit spending are the
complex topics that may be honoured with the Nobel economic prize.
Like the traditional Nobel science prizes - medicine, physics
and chemistry - there is no precise formula for predicting the
decision by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Perennial contender Jagdish Bhagwati, a noted proponent of free
trade and critic of opponents of globalization, is listed by Thomson
Scientific as a likely winner. The Indian-born Columbia University
economics professor was an external adviser to the World Trade
Organisation and served as a special policy adviser on globalisation
to the United Nations.
Other likely winners include Paul Romer of Stanford University,
who won the 2002 Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics. He`s
been touted for his efforts in developing the New Growth Theory,
which has provided new foundations for businesses and governments
trying to create wealth.
The theory was developed in the 1980s as a response to criticism
of the neoclassical growth model.
Thomas J Sargent of New York University, a leader of the rational
expectations theory, which is used to determine future events
by economic acts, is also mentioned.
The economics prize, worth USD 1.4 million, is the only one of
the Nobel awards not established in the will made by Nobel 111
years ago.
Bureau Report
Jagdish Bhagwati, currently a University Professor at Columbia
University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations,
was born in 1934 and raised in India . He attended Cambridge University
where he graduated in 1956 with a first in Economics Tripos. He
then studied at MIT and Oxford, returning to India in 1961 as
Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and
then as Professor of International Trade at the Delhi School of
Economics. He returned to MIT in 1968, leaving it twelve years
later as the Ford International Professor of Economics to join
Columbia . Until 2001, he used to be Arthur Lehman Professor of
Economics and Professor of Political Science at Columbia . Professor
Bhagwati has also served as Economic Policy Advisor to Director-General,
GATT (1991-1993) and as Special Adviser to the UN on Globalization
(2001). Currently, he is an External Adviser to the WTO and a
member of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's High-level Advisory
Group on the NEPAD process in Africa.
Professor Bhagwati has published more than three hundred articles
and fifty volumes. He is regarded as one of the foremost international
trade theorists of his generation. Three festschrift volumes of
essays in his honor have been published in the USA, the UK, and
the Netherlands.
Five volumes of his collected scientific essays have been published
by MIT Press to date. His early books, India: Planning for Industrialization
(with Padma Desai, 1970) and India (with T.N. Srinivasan, 1975)
are acknowledged to have provided the intellectual case for the
economic reforms now underway in India. His recent book, India
in Transition : Freeing the Economy , was published in 1993 by
Clarendon Press, Oxford . Among his books are: Protectionism (1988),
an international bestseller in several languages, and The World
Trading System at Risk (1991), both reviewed extensively in the
United States and abroad.
His latest books are Free Trade Today ( Princeton, 2002) and
In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), both reviewed in leading
magazines and newspapers worldwide and translated into several
languages.
Professor Bhagwati also writes frequently for The New York Times
, The Wall Street Journal , and The Financial Times . His writings
on public policy have been published by MIT Press in two successive
volumes: A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade,
Immigration, and Democracy (1998) which won the prestigious Eccles
Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing; and The Wind of the
Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization (2001),
both volumes reviewed extensively in newspapers, magazines and
journals worldwide. He has appeared frequently on national television
programs, including CNN, BBC, MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour and the
Charlie Rose Show.
Professor Bhagwati has delivered many prestigious lectures, among
them the Frank Graham Lecture at Princeton , the Bertil Ohlin
Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, the Harry Johnson
Lecture in London, the Eyskens Lectures in Belgium, the Radhakrishnan
Lectures in Oxford, and the Prebisch Lecture at UNCTAD IX in Johannesburg.
He is a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research
. He was advisor to India 's Finance Minister, now Prime Minister,
on India 's economic reforms.
He works with several NGOs in the US and India . He is on the
Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch (Asia) and was a
member of the Advisory Board of the Council on Economic Priorities
Accreditation Agency (which has created the SA 8000 Standard for
Corporate Social Accountability).
Professor Bhagwati founded in 1971 the Journal of International
Economics , the premier journal in the field today, and Economics
& Politics in 1989.
Professor Bhagwati is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and
has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society,
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a Vice President,
and has been elected Distinguished Fellow, of the American Economic
Association. He holds honorary degrees from several universities,
including, Erasmus (Netherlands) and Sussex (UK). Among the awards
he has received are the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal ( India ),
the Bernhard Harms Prize (Germany), the Kenan Prize (USA), the
John R. Commons Award (USA), the Freedom Prize (Switzerland),
and the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy
(USA).
He is married to Padma Desai, the Gladys and Ronald Harriman Professor
of Comparative Economic Systems at Columbia University and a scholar
of Russian and other former socialist countries' transition problems.
They have one daughter, Anuradha Kristina, currently at Kennedy
School at Harvard and former Captain in the US Marine Corps.
