One of the world's leading economists has joined the University of Manchester.
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta has recently joined the teaching faculty at the University of Manchester. He is an expert on international development and the environment and will work as a part-time Professor of Environmental and Development Economics at the University's Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) and Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI).
The renowned academic will help conduct research in what he says is a neglected field of study: the link between Third World poverty and localised environmental problems.
"Mainstream 20th century economics ignored nature not only as a direct source of sustenance, but also as a factor in production activities. The latter may appear to be far removed in the lives of people living in the affluent West, but they are of direct and immediate relevance to rural people in the third world. The World Bank and UNDP have done much to alert the world about the numbers that suffer from absolute poverty, but they have consistently neglected to study the dependence of the world's poor on nature. That may be why the policies international organizations have espoused over the years have failed to do much to reduce poverty," said Professor Dasgupta.
Sir Partha was knighted in 2002 for services to economics and has been President of the Royal Economic Society and the European Economic Association. He joins Professor Mohan Munasinghe who was appointed Director General of the Sustainable Consumption Institute last month. Professor Munasinghe is one of the world's leading thinkers on energy, sustainable development and climate change.
He is Vice Chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's leading scientific body tasked with evaluating the risk of climate change caused by human activity.
Read the full announcement on the Manchester News Page.
Content added on 22 December 2008.
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