Ocampo Honored by Madrid’s Universidad Complutense

Professor José Antonio Ocampo will receive an honorary doctorate on December 2 from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, one of the oldest universities in the world and the highest ranked in Spain.

Ocampo, who is the director of SIPA’s concentration in economic and political development, said he was “thrilled” to receive the honor. He noted that he has a personal connection to the school, where his daughter studied political science as an undergraduate and development cooperation as a graduate student.

The Madrid university’s economics department will also sponsor a December 1 address by Ocampo on cooperation in the international monetary system. The other honorary degree recipient, Edmund Fitzgerald of Oxford University, is slated to speak on international fiscal cooperation.

Ocampo spoke briefly with SIPA News about the diverse professional experience that brought him this latest honor.

 “I consider myself to be a social scientist in the broadest sense,” he said. “While I am an economist, I also studied sociology and political science and have written extensively on history.”

While Ocampo said his own education was a mix of Keynesian and neoclassical thinking, he said it is important to present different perspectives to the classroom.

“In my own youth I was influenced by other schools, including Latin American structuralism and Marxism,” he said. “I think the debates of the late 1960s and ’70s reflected a much deeper understanding of social reality than many theoretical discussions of today.”

“The debate over economics is enriched by the multiplicity of schools of thought,” he added. “It’s not good practice to teach one school alone.”

Over the years, Ocampo has worked for a variety of organizations, including his home government in Colombia, regional institutions like the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the United Nations. He said the movement between sectors and organizations has been instrumental to his work.

“Mixing theory and practice,” he said, “has served to form my view of the world in ways that neither academic nor political life alone would have made possible.”