Jagdish Bhagwati

Former director and professor of economics, law, and international affair

Jagdish Bhagwati is a Professor of Economics, Law, and International Affairs at Columbia University and former Director of the Raj Center on Indian Economic Policies.

He was Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). 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 the future of the WTO and on 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 of Brazil on the future of UNCTAD. Recently, he has been co-chair with President Halonen of Finland of the Eminent Persons Group on Developing Countries in the World Economy.

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 books, Why Growth Matters (PublicAffairs, 2013), Termites in the Trading System (Oxford University Press, 2008), and In Defense of Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2004), have attracted worldwide acclaim and received notice in leading magazines and newspapers like The Economist, the Financial Times, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal. 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, he has also received several prizes and seventeen honorary degrees, and high awards from the governments of India and Japan.

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.