Human Well Being and Economic Accounting

Location
Sir Alan Walters Harvard Lecture Theatre
Dates
Monday 18 March 2019 (17:30-18:30)
Contact

Register for this event here.

To find out more please email Hilary Mousley.

Dasgupta

SPEAKER: Sir Partha Dasgupta, Unversity of Cambridge

In this lecture Sir Partha will review - and to an extent further develop - a normative theory that offers a unified language for both sustainability and policy analyses. The theory shows that by economic growth we should mean growth in an inclusive measure of wealth, which is the social worth of an economy’s entire stock of capital assets, not growth in GDP nor improvements in the many ad hoc indicators of human development that have been proposed in recent years. He will show that the concept of inclusive wealth invites us to extend the notion of assets and the idea of investment well beyond conventional usage. This has radical implications for the way national accounts are prepared and interpreted. Sir Partha will then sketch a recent publication that has put the theory to work by studying the composition of wealth accumulation in contemporary India

Partha Dasgupta, was born in Dhaka (at that time in India) and educated in Varanasi (Matriculation 1958 from Rajghat Besant School), Delhi (B.Sc. Hons, in Physics, 1962, University of Delhi), and Cambridge (B.A. Hons. in Mathematics, 1965, and Ph.D. in Economics, 1968) at the University of Cambridge). He is the son of the noted economist Amiya Dasgupta (1903-1992). He is married to Carol Dasgupta, who is a psychotherapist. They have three children: Zubeida Dasgupta-Clark (an educational psychologist), Shamik (a philosophy professor), and Aisha (who works on reproductive health in Africa).

Dasgupta is Frank Ramsey Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and Professorial Research Fellow at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester. 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. During 1989-92 he was also Professor of Economics, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Program in Ethics in Society at Stanford University; and during 1991-97 he was Chairman of the (Scientific Advisory) Board of the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm. Since 1999 he has been a Founder Member of the Management and Advisory Committee of the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE), Kathmandu. In 1996 he helped to establish the journal Environment and Development Economics, published by Cambridge University Press, whose purpose has been not only to publish original research at the interface of poverty and the environmental-resource base, but also to provide an opportunity to scholars in developing countries to publish their findings in an international journal.

Professor Dasgupta's research interests have covered welfare and development economics, the economics of technological change, population, environmental and resource economics, the theory of games, the economics of undernutrition, and the economics of social capital. His publications include Guidelines for Project Evaluation (with S.A. Marglin and A.K. Sen; United Nations, 1972), Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources (with G.M. Heal; Cambridge University Press, 1979 (recipient of the United States Association of Environmental and Resource Economists "Publication of Enduring Quality Award 2003")); The Control of Resources (Harvard University Press, 1982); An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993); Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (Oxford University Press, 2001; revised edition, 2004); and Economics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007).

Professor Dasgupta is a Fellow of:

  • the Econometric Society (1975),
  • the British Academy (1989),
  • the Royal Society (2004),
  • and the Third World Academy of Sciences (2001).

Member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (1997) and Academia Europaea (2009), as well as:

  • Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1991),
  • Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991),
  • Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (2001),
  • Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society (2005),
  • Foreign Member of Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (2009),
  • Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics (1995),
  • Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (2010),
  • Honorary Member of the American Economic Association (1997),
  • Honorary Professor at the University of Copenhagen (2008-2010),
  • Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large (2007-2013) at Cornell University.

He is a past President of:

  • the Royal Economic Society (1998-2001),
  • the European Economic Association (1999),
  • Section F (Economics) of the BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) Festival of Science (2006),
  • and President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2010-11).

Professor Dasgupta was named Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in her Birthday Honours List in 2002 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. He was the recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Award in 2007, of the American Agricultural Economics Association.