Kaushik Basu (@kaushikcbasu) is Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is the second World Bank Chief Economist from a developing country. He is on leave from Cornell University where he is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies. Prior to this he served as the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India at the Ministry of Finance. He was Chairman of the Department of Economics and during 2006-9 he was Director of the Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell.

Earlier he was Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, where in 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi and was its first Executive Director. He is also a founding member of the Madras School of Economics.
Mr. Basu has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the London School of Economics, where he was a Distinguished Visitor in 1993. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Princeton University and M.I.T. and holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.

He is currently the President of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, which was founded by Amartya Sen. He has held advisory posts with the ILO, the World Bank, the Reserve Bank of India and was, for several years, a member of the steering committee of the Expert Group of Development Issues set up by the Swedish Government. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Exim Bank of India.

He is Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, and served or serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Development Economics, World Bank Economic Review and the Japanese Economic Review.

A Fellow of the Econometric Society, Kaushik Basu has published widely in the areas of Development Economics, Industrial Organization, Game Theory and Welfare Economics. His most recent books are Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics and An Economist’s Miscellany.

In May 2008 he was awarded one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Bhushan, by the President of India. 

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. He is also the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics and an honorary fellow of LSE. 

Nicholas Stern is the IG Patel Chair of Economics and Government, Director of the India Observatory and Chairman of the Asia Research Centre at LSE.

Craig Calhoun (@craigjcalhoun) is the Director of LSE.

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