Kaushik Basu

Kaushik Basu

Born	9 January 1952 (1952-01-09)
Nationality	Indian
Institution	Cornell University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alma mater	University of Delhi (B.A.) London School of Economics (M.Sc./Ph.D.)
Influences	Amartya Sen
Awards	Padma Bhushan, 2008 The National Mahalanobis Memorial Medal (1989) UGC-Prabhavananda Award for Economics, 1990
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

Kaushik Basu (born 9 January 1952) is an Indian economist who is currently the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and is also the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics and, till recently, he was Chairman of the Department of Economics and Director, Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell University.

Early life

Kaushik Basu was born in Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, and schooled at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata. In an autobiographical essay he noted that finishing school in 1969 he was caught in a dilemma. His father wanted him to study physics. But those were revolutionary times and he wanted to study nothing. They settled on economics as a half-way house between physics and nothing. In 1969 he moved to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics (Honors), with Mathematics as subsidiary, from St. Stephen's College. He then went on to the London School of Economics, to do his M.Sc in Economics completing it in 1974. Post his Master's, Basu was supposed to move to England to study law and take over his father's legal practice. But he had fallen in love with the concept of logic and deductive reasoning and came under the spell of Amartya Sen in his early days. He stayed on at the London School for his PhD, from 1974 to 1976. He did his PhD on choice theory under the chairmanship of Amartya Sen.

Personal Life and Beliefs

Kaushik Basu is married to Alaka Malwade Basu with two children,Karna and Diksha.

Alaka is a professor at the Department of Development Sociolgy, Cornell University and a visiting professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her areas of specialization include Population Studies, Reproductive Health and Family Planning, Gender and Development, Child Health and Mortality, Culture and Demographic Behavior.

Kaushik Basu believes strongly that good moral qualities are essential for growth and development within the economy. Honesty, trustworthiness and integrity are important qualities that need to be inculcated in an individual for personal development as well as within the society for development. Basu also feels the need to promote quality thinking in government and public debate. In his paper, 'Why,for a class of Bribes, the act of Giving Bribes should be treated as Legal", Basu refers to certain bribes as 'Harrasment Bribes' that are given to get what a person is legslly entitled to such as a ration card or a passport. In such cases, only the act of taking a bribe should be illegal. This will cause a divergence in the interests of the bribe giver and taker and will be willing to cooperate to help the bribe taker get caught. This view has been under a lot of public debate.

Basu describes himself as left-leaning and owes his intelluctual awakening to [[Bertrand Russel}. His greatest icon is David Hume.

Career

On completing his PhD from London, Basu lectured briefly at Reading University, and returned to India in 1977, to be Reader in Economics and, later, Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. Over the years Basu has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve) and the London School of Economics (where he was Distinguished Visitor in 1993); he has been Visiting Professor at MIT, Harvard and Princeton; and Visiting Scientist at the Indian Statistical Institute. He is currently Chief Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Finance of the Government of India. He is on leave from Cornell University where he is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, Basu has published scientific papers in development economics, game theory, industrial organization, political economy and the economics of child labor, and crafted the traveler's dilemma.

More recently, he has worked on aggregating infinite streams of returns, and the axiomatic structures, pertaining to inter-generational anonymity and different forms of the Pareto principle, that such aggregations can satisfy.

In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics (CDE) at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, and was the Centre's first Executive Director till 1996.

He is a columnist for BBC News Online, Hindustan Times, Business Standard and is the author of several books on economics and a play, Crossings at Benaras Junction, which was published in The Little Magazine (vol. 6, 2005). He is the editor of the Oxford Companion to Economics in India, published by Oxford University Press (February, 2007), which is a compendium on the Indian economy. His new book, Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics, was published in 2011 by Princeton University Press and Penguin, India, and is to be published shortly in translation in Italian, Chinese and Spanish.

Kaushik Basu is also the president of the Human Development and capabilities association founded by Amartya Sen which promotes high quality research in areas of human development and capability. He is the Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, Associate Editor of Japanese Economic Review and is on the Board of Editors of the 'World Bank Economic Review.

He is also the creator of the two-player board game Dui-doku.

Awards and Honors

• CORE Fellow, 1981-82
• The National Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, 1989
• UGC-Prabhavananda Award for Economics, 1990
• Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1991-Present
• Padma Bhushan, Government of India, 2008
• D.Litt. (Honoris Causa) for “Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Economics”, University of Lucknow, 2010.
• Elected President-Elect of the Human Development and Capabilities Association.

Books

• Revealed Preference of Government, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
• The Less Developed Economy: A Critique of Contemporary Theory, Basil Blackwell, 1984.
• Agrarian Structure and Economic Development, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. This book is part of the series Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics edited by J. Lesourne and H. Sonnenschein.
• Economic Graffiti: Essays for Everyone. Oxford University Press.  1991
• Lectures in Industrial Organization Theory. Blackwell Publishers.  1992
• (editor, with Pulin Nayak) Development Policy and Economic Theory, Oxford University Press, 1992.
• (editor, with Mukul Majumdar and Tapan Mitra) Capital, Investment and Development, Basil Blackwell, 1993.
• (editor) Agrarian Questions, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• (editor, with Prasanta Pattanaik and Kotaro Suzumura) Development, Welfare and Ethics, Clarendon Press, 1995.
• Of People, Of Places: Sketches from an Economist's Notebook. Oxford University Press.  1994.
• (editor, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam) Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India's Secular Identity, Penguin paperback, New Delhi, 1996.
• Analytical Development Economics, The MIT Press, 1997, ISBN 0-262-02423-3.
• Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics. Oxford University Press.  2000.
• (editor) Readings in Political Economy, Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
• (editor, with Henrik Horn, Lisa Roman and Judith Shapiro) International Labor Standards, Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
• (editor) India's Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond, The MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 0-262-02556-6.
• Collected Papers In Theoretical Economics, Volume 1: Development, Markets, And Institutions. Oxford University Press. 2005. ISBN 0-19-566761-1. 
• Collected Papers In Theoretical Economics, Volume 2: Rationality, Games And Strategic Behaviour. Oxford University Press.  2005.
• (editor) Oxford Companion to Economics in India, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• An Economist's Miscellany, Oxford University Press, 2011

Research Papers

• Isolate and Proximate Illiteracy, with James E. Foster and S. Subramaniam, Economic and Political Weekly, 2000
• India and the Global Economy, Economic and Political Weekly, 2001
• Is Literacy Shared Within Households? Theory and Evidence from Bangladesh, with Ambar Narayan and Martin Ravillion, 2001
• Stratergy for Economic Reform in West Bengal, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and Ashok Sanjar Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, 2002
• The Collective Model of the Household and an Unexpected Implication for Child Labor Hypothesis and an Empirical Test, with Ranjan Ray, 2002
• EMS and Partyless Panchayats, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and Ashok Sanjar Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, 2003
• Contract Farming, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and Ashok Sanjar Guha, Economic and Political Weekly, 2003
• New Empirical Development Economics, Economic and Political Weekly, 2005
• Beyond Nandigram: Industialisation in West Bengal, with Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Mrinal Dutta Chaudhuri, Maitreesh Ghatak and others, Economic and Political Weekly, 2007
• Practicality in Economics, Economic and Political Weekly, 2007
• India's Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Policymaking in a Globalised World, Economic and Political Weekly, 2008
• China and India: Idiosyncratic Paths to High Growth, Economic and Political Weekly, 2009
• The Economics of Foodgrain Management in India , 2010
• India's Foodgrain Policy: An Economic Theory Perspective, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011
• Understanding Inflation and Controlling it, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011
• Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a Bribe should be Treated as Legal, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011
• The evolving dynamics of global economic power in the postcrisis world: Revelations from a new Index of Government Economic Power, with Kaushik Basu, Supriyo De, Rangeet Ghosh and Shweta
• Strategic Theory for Central Banking: How to Influence Exchange Rates without Affecting Reserves, 2011

External reference

• Kaushik Basu - Biography
• [1] Kaushik Basu's personal page: (now defunct link)
• [2] Kaushik Basu's articles at BBC world
• [3] - Globalization and Babool Gum