Abstract
In this lecture, the speaker will present a unified language for both sustainability and policy analyses. He will argue that by economic growth we should mean growth in wealth (which is the social worth of an economy's entire stock of capital assets), not growth in GDP or improvements in the many ad hoc indicators of human development that have been proposed in recent years. Concurrently, the theory the speaker will advance shows that by poverty we should mean small wealth; and that the distribution of well-being ought to be judged in terms of the distribution of wealth, not that of income or education or the many other indicators that are currently in use. He will show that the concept of wealth invites us to extend the notion of assets and the idea of investment well beyond conventional usage. The perspective has radical implications for the way national accounts are prepared and interpreted. The speaker will also report recent empirical studies that have tried to record the progress and regress of nations in recent years in terms movements in their wealth relative to their populations.
About the speaker
Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta obtained his PhD in Economics in 1968 at University of Cambridge. He taught at the London School of Economics during 1971-1984 and moved to the University of Cambridge in 1985 as Professor of Economics, where he served as Chairman of the Faculty of Economics in 1997-2001. In 1989, he was appointed as a Professor of Economics, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Program in Ethics in Society at Stanford University. He returned to University of Cambridge since 1991 and currently is the Emeritus Professor and Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics.
Prof Dasgupta's research interests focus on welfare and development economics, the economics of technological change, population, environmental and resource economics, the theory of games, the economics of under-nutrition, and the economics of social capital. His publications include Guidelines for Project Evaluation, Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources; The Control of Resources; An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution; Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment; and Economics: A Very Short Introduction.
Prof Dasgupta was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society; the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory; the British Academy; the Royal Society and the Third World Academy of Sciences. He was also elected an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics; Trinity College, Cambridge, and Distinguished CES Fellow 2011, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich. In 2002, Prof Dasgupta was also named Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in her Birthday Honours List for "services to economics"; was co-winner (with Karl-Goran Maler of the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm) of the 2002 Volvo Environment Prize and of the 2004 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics; was recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Award, 2007, of the American Agricultural Economics Association, the Zayed International Environment Prize (Category II: Scientific and Technological Achievements), 2010; and the 2015 Blue Planet Prize for Scientific Achievements.
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