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Jagdish Bhagwati

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Special Adviser to the UN on Globalization, and External Adviser to the WTO

Jagdish Bhagwati, is University Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been Economic Policy Adviser to Arthur Dunkel, Director General of GATT (1991-93), Special Adviser to the UN on Globalization, and External Adviser to the WTO. He has served on the Expert Group appointed by the Director General of the WTO on t...

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...he Future of the WTO and the Advisory Committee to Secretary General Kofi Annan on the NEPAD process in Africa, and was also a member of the Eminent Persons Group under the chairmanship of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso on the future of UNCTAD.

Professor Bhagwati has published more than three hundred articles and has authored or edited over fifty volumes; he also writes frequently for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times, as well as reviews for The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement. Professor Bhagwati is described as the most creative international trade theorist of his generation and is a leader in the fight for freer trade. His most recent book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), has attracted worldwide acclaim. Five volumes of his scientific writings and two of his public policy essays have been published by MIT press. The recipient of six festschrifts in his honor, the latest three on his 70th birthday, he has also received several prizes and honorary degrees, including awards from the governments of India (Padma Vibhushan) and Japan (Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star).

His early books, India: Planning for Industrialization (with Padma Desai, 1970) and India (with T.N. Srinivasan, 1975) are acknowledged to have provided the intellectual case for the economic reforms now underway in India. His recent book, India in Transition: Freeing the Economy , was published in 1993 by Clarendon Press, Oxford. Among his other books are: The Economics of Underdeveloped Countries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966) and Protectionism (MIT Press, 1988), both international bestsellers. His latest books are Free Trade Today (Princeton, 2002) and In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), both published to worldwide acclaim. His books have been translated into 16 languages.

His writings on public policy have been published by MIT Press in two successive volumes: A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration, and Democracy (1998) which won the prestigious Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing; and The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization (2001), both volumes reviewed extensively worldwide. He was recently chosen as one of 100 of the world's most influential policy intellectuals by Prospect, England's leading magazine, and Foreign Policy (US). He has been extensively profiled, including in The New York Times, The Chronicle for Higher Education, and Finance & Development. He has appeared on television shows such as BBC, MacNeil Lehrer News Hour, The Charlie Rose Show, Bloomberg and C-Span.

Professor Bhagwati has delivered many prestigious lectures, among them the Frank Graham Lecture at Princeton , the Bertil Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, the Harry Johnson Lecture in London, the Eyskens Lectures in Belgium, the Radhakrishnan Lectures in Oxford, and the Prebisch Lecture at UNCTAD IX in Johannesburg. He has debated the leading critics of globalization today, including Ralph Nader and Naomi Klein, and lectured in defense of globalization in numerous campuses and other public appearances worldwide.

He is a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research . He was advisor to India 's Finance Minister, now Prime Minister, on India 's economic reforms.

He works with several NGOs in the US and India . He is on the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch (Asia) and was a member of the Advisory Board of the Council on Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency (which has created the SA 8000 Standard for Corporate Social Accountability). He was chosen as the first recipient of the Asian NGOs' Award, the Suh Sang Don Award.

Professor Bhagwati founded in 1971 the Journal of International Economics , the premier journal in the field today, and Economics & Politics in 1989.

Professor Bhagwati is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a Vice President, and has been elected Distinguished Fellow, of the American Economic Association. He holds honorary degrees from several universities, including, Erasmus (Netherlands) and Sussex (UK). Among the awards he has received are the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal ( India ), the Bernhard Harms Prize (Germany), the Kenan Prize (USA), the John R. Commons Award (USA), the Freedom Prize (Switzerland), and the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy (USA).

A native of India, Professor Bhagwati attended Cambridge University where he graduated in 1956 with a first in Economics Tripos. He then continued to study at MIT and Oxford returning to India in 1961 as Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and then as Professor of International Trade at the Delhi School of Economics. He returned to MIT in 1968, leaving it twelve years later as the Ford International Professor of Economics to join Columbia.