2008 Leontief Prize

2008 Leontief Prize
Awarded to José Antonio Ocampo and Robert Wade

Dr. José Antonio Ocampo is one of the deans of Latin American economics.  His numerous articles, books, and reports have made major contributions to development scholarship, and policy. He is a leading thinker on the reform of the international financial architecture and on macroeconomic policies to reduce the vulnerability of developing countries to international financial volatility. He worked in the United Nations, as Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and held several cabinet-level government posts in his native Colombia. He currently serves as Professor and Co-director with Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue. His many books include Globalization and Development: A Latin American and Caribbean Perspective, Regional Financial Cooperation, and the forthcoming volume on Capital Market Liberalization and Development.

Dr. Robert Wade has made seminal contributions to several fields of study. His book Governing the Market, on the state’s role in East Asian development, won the American Political Science Association’s prize for Best Book in Political Economy. His Village Republics: Economic Conditions for Collective Action in South India, showed that the tragedy of the commons does not always hold true and that collective action can be an alternative to privatization and state control in the management of common property resources. More recently he has emerged as a leading critic of the view that globalization reduces global inequality and global poverty, and a leading contributor to rethinking development policy and the international policy framework.