Kaushik Basu

Kaushik Basu was born in Kolkata, India, where he attended St. Xavier's Collegiate School. 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 half-way compromise between physics and nothing. In 1969 he moved to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics, from St. Stephen's College, Delhi. He then attended London School of Economics and was awarded MSc in economics from University of London in 1974. After earning his master's degree, 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 became fascinated by Amartya Sen's work.[5] He remained at the London School of Economics, University of London for his PhD, from 1974 to 1976.[6] He completed his PhD at University of London under the tutelage of Amartya Sen. He has received honorary doctorates from Lucknow University, Lucknow, in 2011, Assam University, Silchar, in 2012, Fordham University, New York, in 2013, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in 2013, University of Bath, U.K., in 2016, on the occasion of the university's fiftieth anniversary, and the Jadavpur University Kolkata in 2018.[7] His childhood interest in Euclidean geometry found expression and drew attention when he was Chief Economist of the World Bank and published a paper giving a new proof of the Pythagoras theorem, via a property of isosceles triangles.[8][9]

Kaushik Basu is married to Alaka Malwade Basu with two children, Karna and Diksha. Alaka is a professor at Cornell's Department of Development Sociology and has been a visiting professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Over the years Basu has held visiting professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Université catholique de Louvain's Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and the London School of Economics, where he was a distinguished visitor in 1993. Additionally, he was a visiting scientist at the Indian Statistical Institute, a public university in Kolkata, India.

Before his appointment as the World Bank's Chief Economist, Basu was the Chief Economic Adviser to India's Ministry of Finance while 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 organisation, political economy, the economics of child labour,[13] and crafted the traveller's dilemma.[14]

In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, and served as its first executive director until 1996.[15]

His entry into government in 2009 was a new experience. In an interview with the Bengali magazine Desh, he said his earlier experience of government, when he was setting up CDE, was not a happy one. Letters and phone calls were met with no response. In desperation he went to see the then Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh. Many bureaucrats saw him waiting to meet the Minister. Thereafter their behaviour changed so markedly that he toyed with the idea of writing to the Minister to visit him periodically but not to disturb the Minister, just to sit in his waiting area for a while and go away.

Kaushik Basu is a columnist for BBC News Online, the 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.

On 5 September 2012, he was appointed Chief Economist at the World Bank.[2]

Kaushik Basu was 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 has been elected to take over as president of the International Economic Association in June 2017, and to serve a three-year term thereafter.

Kaushik Basu is the motivation behind Arthapedia, an online portal that provide explanations to the concepts used in Indian public policy to assist its understanding among citizens.[16]

He created Dui-doku, a competitive two-player version of Sudoku.[17]

While working at the World Bank, Basu also taught courses on game theory at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.[18] He writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate.[19]

He has been the on the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2011, serving as Jury Chair from 2012.[20]

Basu currently teaches at Cornell University, where he has a joint appointment as an economics professor in the Department of Economics and the SC Johnson College of Business.

• Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award, 2021[21][22]
• Padma Bhushan, Government of India, 2008[23]
• Served as President of the Human Development and Capabilities Association.[24]
• Doctorate of Humane Letters, Fordham University, 2013.[25]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kaushik Basu.

• Kaushik Basu Website