Partha Dasgupta

Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta (born 17 November 1942) is an Indian-British economist who is Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, His PhD supervisor was Sir James Mirrlees, also a member of the Apostles.

Career Research His research interests have covered welfare and development economics; the economics of technological change; population, environmental, and resource economics; social capital; the theory of games; ecological economics, and the economics of malnutrition.

Dasgupta had a long-standing collaboration with the late Karl-Goran Maler, with whom he developed the concept of 'inclusive wealth' as a measure of human well-being and helped to establish (with a grant from the McArthur Foundation, channelled through the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm) the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE), based in Kathmandu, which since 1999 has conducted annual teaching and research workshops on ecological economics for young economists based in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Simultaneously, Dasgupta and Maler helped to launch the journal Environmental and Development Economics (Cambridge University Press) so as to enable economists in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to publish original research in a western journal.

Although Dasgupta has worked on research problems in a number of fields, his long-standing interest has been ecological economics, beginning with his Ph.D. thesis in which he placed he problem of optimum population and saving in a model of economic possibilities in which the biosphere set limits on economic growth. His 1982 monograph, 'The Control of Resources', set an agenda for future research at the nexus of population, consumption, and the natural environment, which he has pursued step by step in a long series of journal articles and books.

In 2019 he led production of a report on the economics of biodiversity, commissioned by the UK government, and published in February 2021 with the title 'The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review'. An important objective was to develop a new measure to account for the capital inherent in the natural world (economist today call that 'natural capital') that could be used as an ingredient in, among other things, the evaluation of investment projects and assessment of the sustainability of economic programmes. However, as Dasgupta writes in the Preface, the Review is an investigation into a larger concern, in that it reconstructs contemporary growth and development economics and the economics of poverty by recognising that the human economy is embedded in Nature, it is not external to Nature. The Review explores the far reaching implications of the altered perspective.

Appointments Dasgupta taught at the London School of Economics (Lecturer 1971–1975; Reader 1975–1978; Professor of Economics 1978–1984 )

Honours Dasgupta has been honoured by elections as: Fellow of the Econometric Society; He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to economics and the natural environment.

Two collections of essays have been published in his honour:

"Environment & Development Economics: Essays in Honour of Sir Partha Dasgupta," edited by S. Barrett, K.-G. Maler, and E.S. Maskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2014.

"Sustainable Consumption: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives in Honour of Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta," edited by D. Southerton and A. Ulph (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2014.

Prizes and awards

Dasgupta was co-recipient (with Karl-Göran Mäler) of the 2002 Volvo Environment Prize; and (also with Mäler) of the 2004 Boulding Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics;, co-recipient (with Geoffrey Heal) of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists' "Publication of Enduring Quality Award 2003" for their book, Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources; recipient of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, 2007, of the American Agricultural Economics Association; recipient of the Zayed International Environment Prize (II: scientific and technological achievements) in 2011; and recipient of the European Lifetime Achievement Award (in Environmental and Resource Economics) from the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2014. In 2007, together with Eric Maskin he was awarded the Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics, a joint prize of the Kempe Foundation and the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE). He was awarded the 2015 Blue Planet Prize for Environmental Research, the 2016 Tyler Prize, and the Kew International Medal, 2021 of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew. In 2022 he was honoured by Freedom of the City of London by Special Invitation. The same year he was awarded the Champions of the Earth award for Science and Innovation by the UNEP. For 2023 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category "Economics, Finance and Management".

Dasgupta was awarded a Doctorate (Honoris Causa) by Wageningen University, 2000; Catholic University of Louvain, 2007; Faculte Université Saint-Louis, 2009; University of Bologna, 2010; Tilburg University, 2012; Harvard University, 2013; University of York, 2017.

Selected publications Guidelines for Project Evaluation (with S. A. Marglin and A. K. Sen), United Nations, 1972. Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources (with G. M. Heal), Cambridge University Press, 1979. "Utilitarianism, information and rights" in The Control of Resources, Harvard University Press, 1982. An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. (Pub. description) Social Capital: A Multifaceted Perspective (co-editor with Ismail Serageldin). Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000. * (book preview except pp. 217–401, 403–25) Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, Rev. ed. 2004. Economics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (OUP Website) Selected Papers of Partha Dasgupta: Vol.1, Institutions, Innovations, and Human Values; Vol. 2, Poverty, Population, and Natural Resources. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.