University Professor
Columbia University

Jagdish Bhagwati is 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.

A native of India, Professor Bhagwati attended Cambridge University where he graduated in 1956 with a first in Economics Tripos.  He then continued to study 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. 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.