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Bios for Conference Participants
Jagdish Bhagwati, currently University Professor, Economics and Law, at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Economic Policy Adviser to the Director General, GATT (1991-93) and also served as Special Adviser to the UN on Globalization and External Adviser to the Director General, WTO. Currently, he is a member of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's Advisory Group on the NEPAD process in Africa. Five volumes of his scientific writings and two of his public policy essays have been published by MIT press. The recipient of six festschrifts in his honor, he has also received several prizes and honorary degrees. Professor Bhagwati has published more than three hundred articles and fifty volumes and also writes frequently for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times, and has reviewed for The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement. Professor Bhagwati is described as the most creative international trade theorist of his generation and is a leader in the fight for freer trade. His most recent book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), has attracted worldwide acclaim.
Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where he regularly teaches the principles course. He received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from MIT. Prior to his current position, he taught at Yale, Stanford, and MIT. He also spent a year on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors in 1982-83.His research is mainly in the area of international trade, where he is one of the founders of the "new trade theory" with its focus on increasing returns and imperfect competition. He also works in international finance, with a concentration in currency crises. In 1991, Krugman received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark medal. In addition to his teaching and academic research, Krugman writes extensively for nontechnical audiences. Krugman is a regular op-ed columnist for The New York Times. His latest trade book (published in September, 2003) is a collection of his NYT articles entitlted The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. His earlier books, Peddling Prosperity and The Age of Diminished Expectations, have become modern classics.
Robert Solow (Nobel Laureate 1987) is one of the major figures of the Neo-Keynesian Synthesis macroeconomics. Together with Paul Samuelson, he formed the core of the M.I.T. economics department which has been widely viewed as the "mainstream" of the post-war period. Together, Solow and Samuelson have contributed to various landmark pieces of work: e.g. on von Neumann growth theory (1953), on capital theory (1956), on linear programming (1958) and on the Phillips Curve (1960). Individually, Robert Solow is best known for his work on the Neoclassical growth model (1956, 1970). His use of an aggregate production function in that paper launched the Cambridge Capital Controversy with pitted Solow and Samuelson against Joan Robinson and the Cambridge Keynesians. He was also one of the co-inventors of the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function (1961). He is also responsible for exploring and popularizing the "long-run multiplier" derived from a dynamic government budget constraint. (1973). It was Solow's work on growth that earned him a Nobel Memorial prize in 1987.
Sylvia Nasar is Knight Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a former New York Times economics correspondent and author of A Beautiful Mind, the biography of Nobel Laureate John Nash. She is currently writing a book about 20th century economic thinkers.