Jagdish Bhagwati

Jagdish Bhagwati

Encyclopedia

Tutorials

Encyclopedia

Dictionary

Directory

Email this to a friend Jagdish_Bhagwati

Jagdish Bhagwati

Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati (born 1934) is a economist known for his advocacy of free trade. He is a University Professor of Economics at Columbia University.

Early years and personal life
Career
Awards and praise
Books
See also
References
External links

Early years and personal life

Bhagwati was born into a Gujarati Family in Mumbai in 1934 and graduated from Sydenham College, Mumbai. He graduated with a BA in Economics from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1956, and received Ph.D. Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.

Bhagwati is married to Padma Desai, the Gladys and Ronald Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems at Columbia University. They have one daughter. His elder brother Justice P.N Bhagwati is a former Chief Justice of India and his niece Pallavi Shroff heads one of India's largest law firms.

Career

Bhagwati has previously served as an external advisor to the Director General of the World Trade Organization in 2001, as a special policy advisor on globalization to the United Nations in 2000, and as an economics policy advisor to the Director-General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade from 1991 to 1993. From 1968 until 1980, Bhagwati was an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://www.cfr.org/bio.php?id=1753 Bhagwati currently serves on the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch (Asia) and on the board of scholars of the Centre for Civil Society. He is a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2000, Bhagwati was signatory to an amicus briefing, coordinated by the American Enterprise Institute, with Supreme Court to contend that the Environmental Protection Agency should, contrary to a prior ruling, be allowed to take into account the costs of regulations when setting environmental standards.

In January, 2004, Bhagwati published In Defense of Globalization, a book in which he argues "this process [of globalization] has a human face, but we need to make that face more agreeable."

In May, 2004, Bhagwati was one of the experts who took part in the Copenhagen Consensus project.

In 2006, Bhagwati was a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons who reviewed the work of UNCTAD.

Awards and praise

In 2006, he was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star.
He was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce in 2004.
In 2000 he was awarded Padma Vibhushan award.
He received the Seidman Distinguished Award in International Political Economy in 1998.
In 1974, he was awarded the Indian Econometric Society's Mahalanobis Memorial Medal.
Other awards include the Bernhard Harms Prize (Germany), the Kenan Enterprise Award (United States), the Freedom Prize (Switzerland), and the John R. Commons Award (United States).
He has also received honorary degrees from the University of Sussex and Erasmus University, as well as others.http://www.columbia.edu/~jb38/Bhagwati%20awards%20current.pdf http://www.cfr.org/bios/1753/

Paul Samuelson, on the occasion of Bhagwati's 70th Birthday festschrift conference in Gainesville Florida, January 2005 told following:

"I measure a scholar?s prolific-ness not by the mere number of his publishings. Just as the area of a rectangle equals its width times its depth, the quality of a lifetime accomplishment must weight each article by its novelties and wisdoms...Jagdish Bhagwati is more like Haydn: a composer of more than a hundred symphonies and no one of them other than top notch...In the struggle to improve the lot of mankind, whether located in advanced economies or in societies climbing the ladder out of poverty, Jagdish Bhagwati has been a tireless partisan of that globalization which elevates global total-factor----productivities both of richest America and poorest regions of Asia and Africa."^[1]