Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Graduate School at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and Cambridge University, England. He had been at the faculty of MIT, Indian Statistical Institute and Delhi School of Economics before joining Berkeley. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9, and was the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010-11. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on globalization. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. He was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He is the author of 14 books and editor of 13 other books, His two recent popular-level books are Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton, 2013) and Globalization, Democracy and Corruption (Frontpage, 2015). Email: bardhan [at] econ.berkeley.edu
Website: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/bardhan.htm
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the last two decades I have been to China many times, mostly for lectures and conferences primarily in Beijing and Shanghai. Of course, compared to what I saw in my first visit in 1989, China has undergone a dramatic economic…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. June 4 early morning we took a taxi from Friendship Hotel to the Beijing airport, oblivious of the dreadful happenings in Tiananmen Square the previous night. I remember the taxi driver in his almost non-existent English tried to tell us that…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. The interest of both Masahiko Aoki and Gérard Roland in institutional economics easily shaded into comparative analysis of economic systems, including different varieties of capitalism and socialism. Since my student days I have been acutely interested in comparative systems and their…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Gérard Roland came to Berkeley only around the turn of this century. He grew up in Belgium, was a radical student, and after the student movements of Europe subsided, he supported himself for a time by operating trams in the city.…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Andreu Mas-Collel, a mathematical economist from Catalonia, came to Berkeley before I did. He was a student activist in Barcelona, was expelled from his University for activism (those were the days of Franco’s Spain), and later finished his undergraduate degree in…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the Berkeley hills there is a campus bus but the nearest bus stop is about a one-mile walk from my home, if you take a short cut through a meadow, but it gets quite muddy in the rainy season. Still,…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Since my Chair was in International Trade, most of my teaching in Berkeley was in that field of Economics, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The undergraduate classes in Berkeley are large, and mine had sometimes more than 200 students,…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. We arrived in Berkeley and found it to be a pleasant place to live. I always have a partiality for small university towns that are culturally and politically alive. And yet Berkeley is not far from a thriving major city (San…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Most of us were in deep admiration of my DSE colleague Sukhamoy Chakravarty (I used to call him Sukhamoy-da). He was a prodigious scholar, a voracious reader of books (when discussing a book it was not unusual for him to point…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In both ISI and DSE there was one problem I faced in my research that was something I did not fully anticipate before. Some of the major international journals had a submission fee for research papers which was equivalent to something…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. I enjoyed my days in Delhi School of Economics, but some aspects of the university’s policy in recruitment and promotion of teachers used to trouble me. Let me just give two examples. One is from DSE itself, but illustrative of a…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. After my several visits to Kerala, I wrote up an article, “On Life and Death Questions in India” for EPW, where I highlighted the welfare and demographic achievements of Kerala, the most advanced region in India in terms of many indicators…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Soon K.N.Raj gave up his Vice-Chancellorship and moved to his home state, Kerala, and started a new institution, Center for Development Studies (CDS). He tried to lure me (and Kalpana) to join the faculty there, and even offered to get us…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. From the gatherings at Ashis Nandy’s home, and particularly from my numerous discussions with him I learned to think a bit more carefully about three major social concerns in India. One was that whenever we economists faced a socio-economic problem that…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Even though my ISI office was in the Planning Commission building in New Delhi I was living in an apartment complex far away in ‘Old’ Delhi, nearer Delhi University. The main attraction of staying there was the number of academic friends…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. The Naxalite phase in Bengal was a short, tragic chapter in politics, but in Bengal’s cultural-emotional life its implications were deeper, and reflected in its literature (and films)—most poignantly yet forcefully captured by the writer Mahshweta Devi, one of Bengal’s most…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Sometime before Ashok Rudra and I started on our large-scale data collection, I was already doing some theoretical and conceptual work on agrarian relations. My first, mainly theoretical, paper on share-cropping (jointly with TN) came out in American Economic Review in…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At ISI one day the American economist Daniel Thorner walked into my office and engaged me in a lively conversation, with his dancing eyebrows and unbounded enthusiasm. I had, of course, read his many substantive papers in EW on Indian agriculture…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At ISI we were assigned statistical assistants who’d take our large data analysis jobs to the IBM computer at the Planning Commission, but for relatively small jobs they’d do the calculations themselves by furiously rotating the handles of the small Facit…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At my ISI office there were several good economists. Apart from TN, there was B.S. Minhas, Kirit Parikh, Suresh Tendulkar, Sanjit Bose (my friend from MIT days), V.K. Chetty, Dipankar Dasgupta, and others. Of these in many ways the most colorful…
