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 The recent spectacular rise of extreme right-wing parties in Italy and Sweden and the squeaking narrow victory of Lula in Brazil have revived the puzzle that in the face of economic crisis and rising inequality the working classes are often turning politically right, instead of left. This is as prevalent in developing…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Another cultural benefit of my travels, particularly in early days, used to be my exploration of international cinema. I have already mentioned how going out of India I became exposed to a riot of European art films. In later years I…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. The international academic conference circuit—for an amusing account of such circuits, one may read the British writer David Lodge’s novel Small World, which is second in his trilogy of campus novels, the first of which Changing Places is largely on Berkeley…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In connection with our research and meetings in the MacArthur network we did a considerable amount of international travel. Let me now turn to a whole series of my travel-related stories, some in connection with this network but mostly outside it…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the middle 1990’s my friend from the September Group, Sam Bowles, and I were invited by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation to form an inter-disciplinary and international research network to study the effects of Economic Inequality, with the two of us…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. As with game theory, I also attended some courses in Berkeley in another relatively new subject for me, Psychology and Economics (later called Behavioral Economics). In particular I liked the course jointly taught by George Akerlof and Daniel Kahneman (then at…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Being in Berkeley for more than four decades I have met and encountered many leftists and several of them are/were radical in their politics, though in recent years the radical fervor has been somewhat on the decline even in Berkeley. I…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. The western admirers of Amartya Sen as a public intellectual may not be aware that he is actually in a long line of globally engaged cultural elite that Bengal has produced. (This is true to some extent of the elite elsewhere…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In 1998 when Amartya Sen got the Nobel Prize it was a big event for us development economists. Even though the Prize was announced primarily for his contributions to social choice theory (in particular, his exploration of the conditions that permit…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. After LSE I have seen Jean Drèze mostly in India, usually in conferences in Delhi and Kolkata, and at Amartya Sen’s home in Santiniketan (where he used to stay whenever the two of them were writing books together). The Kolkata conferences…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Among other things London School of Economics is associated in my mind with bringing me in touch with one of the most remarkable persons I have ever met in my life, and someone who has been a dear friend over nearly…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In recent years the institution in England I have visited frequently is London School of Economics (LSE), in 1998 as a STICERD Distinguished Visitor, and in 2010-11 as a BP Centennial Professor (this was shortly after the disastrous BP oil spill…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the early 1990’s I was a visiting fellow at St Catherine’s College and an academic visitor at Nuffield College in Oxford. At Nuffield College at that time two friends from my Cambridge student days were Fellows, Jim Mirrlees and Christopher…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. After my student days in Cambridge, in my professional life I have been to Britain many times, occasionally for lectures and conferences, but sometimes more formally on visiting assignments. The latter, except for the two terms at Trinity College, Cambridge, as…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the middle 1990’s along with journal-editing I did another job in Berkeley which was even more arduous, but also in some ways quite exciting and instructive. I was invited by the campus academic senate to serve for 3 years in…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Some years after Carlos died, another friend and another noted development economist, Hans Binswanger, was diagnosed as HIV-positive. He initially took that as a death sentence and gave away much of the material things he had. But by then the new…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the early 1980’s apart from joining the September group, there were two other outside organizations I was invited to join which expanded my intellectual horizons. The first was the South Asia Committee of the Social Science Research Council in New…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the 1990’s Andrei Shleifer was only one among many in the proselytizing army of reformers who went out to the transition economies, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe but also in developing countries, to make them ready for capitalism. They…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Even though I have attended most of the meetings of the September group over the last 40 years, my own participation in the group has really been more like that of an interested outsider looking in. This is for mainly two…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Since 1990 I have also visited Vietnam a few times. Vietnamese economic reform (called doi moi) started in the mid-1980’s. On my first visit I found Hanoi to be more like a small quiet town in India, with a lot of…