From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Wed Mar 21 2007 - 21:06:24 EDT
---- Original Message -----
Subject: Leontief Prize Announcement
Tufts Institute Awards Annual Economics Prize
to Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Steven DeCanio
Fall lectures to focus on climate change, global inequality
March 21, 2007
Download the PDF announcement at:
<http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/about_us/leontief/2007LeontiefAnnouncementMar07.pdf>
Tufts University's Global Development and Environment
Institute announced today that it will award its annual
Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought
to development economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram of the United
Nations and economist Steven DeCanio, known recently for his
groundbreaking work on climate change. The award ceremony will
take place in the fall of 2007 at Tufts University and will
feature lectures by the prize winners on the topic, "Climate
Change, Economic Development, and Global Equity."
The Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE),
which is jointly affiliated with Tufts' Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
inaugurated its economics award in 2000 in memory of Nobel
Prize-winning economist and Institute advisory board member
Wassily Leontief, who had passed away the previous year. The
Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic
Thought recognizes economists whose work, like that of the
institute and Leontief himself, combines theoretical and
empirical research that can promote a more comprehensive
understanding of social and environmental processes.
The inaugural prizes were awarded to John Kenneth Galbraith
and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Subsequent Leontief
Prize recipients have included Paul Streeten, Herman Daly,
Alice Amsden, Dani Rodrik, Nancy Folbre, Robert Frank,
Richard Nelson, Ha-Joon Chang, Samuel Bowles, and Juliet
Schor.
"With the world's attention increasingly focused on the
urgent challenges of climate change and global inequality, we
want to recognize two individuals whose contributions have
helped supply the theoretical framework and empirical
understanding to tackle these global problems," says GDAE
Co-director Neva Goodwin.
Jomo K.S. (as he is known) is Assistant Secretary General for Economic
Development in the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social
Affairs (DESA). Born in Penang, Malaysia, Jomo has a PhD in economics
from Harvard and, before joining the U.N., was a professor in the applied
economics department, University of Malaya, until 2004. He has taught at
Science University of Malaysia, Harvard University, Yale University,
National University of Malaysia, University of Malaya, and Cornell
University. He has authored more than 35 monographs, edited more than 50
books, and translated 11 volumes, in addition to writing many academic
papers and articles for the media. His most recent coauthored books, The
New Development Economics: After the Washington Consensus, and The
Origins of Development Economics: How Schools of Economic Thought have
Addressed Development, are important contributions to renewed debate in
this area.
Steven DeCanio is Professor of Economics at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Among other public service activities, he has been a
Senior Staff Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers,
and a member of the Economic Options Panel convened by the United Nations
Environment Programme to review economic aspects of the Montreal Protocol
on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. He has applied theories of
bounded rationality and principal-agent problems to explain the failure of
firms to make extremely profitable energy efficiency investments, one of
the important puzzles of the field. With a strong mathematics background,
he has provided an in-depth critique of the general equilibrium models
used by many economists to model climate change, most notably in his 2003
book Economic Models of Climate Change: A Critique.
The Global Development And Environment Institute was founded in 1993 with
the goal of promoting a better understanding of how societies can pursue
their economic and community goals in an environmentally and socially
sustainable manner. The Institute develops textbooks and course
materials that incorporate a broad understanding of social, financial and
environmental sustainability. The Institute also carries out
policy-relevant research on globalization and sustainable development,
the role of the market in environmental policy, recycling and material
use, and climate change. Its six-volume book series, Frontier Issues in
Economic Thought, identified and summarized nearly 500 academic articles
on topics often given little attention in the field of economics.
The awards ceremony and Leontief Prize lectures will take
place on Tufts University's Medford Campus at a date to be
announced.
Read more about the Leontief Prize on the GDAE web site at:
<http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/about_us/leontief.html>
Learn more about GDAE on the web: <http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/>
For further information, please contact:
Josh Berkowitz, <Joshua.berkowitz@tufts.edu>
617-627-3530
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