Kaushik Basu became Senior Vice President for Development Economics and World Bank Chief Economist on October 1, 2012. Prior to that, he was Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. He is on leave from his position as Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. He has served as Chairman of Cornell’s Department of Economics and has also directed the university's Center for Analytic Economics and headed the Program for Comparative Economic Development. Earlier Mr. Basu was Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi and was its first Executive Director. He is also a founding member of the Madras School of Economics. Mr. Basu has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the London School of Economics, where he was Distinguished Visitor in 1993. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Princeton University and M.I.T. He holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. Mr. Basu is has received many economics awards in India and has held advisory posts with the ILO, the World Bank, the Reserve Bank of India. He is Editor of the journal Social Choice and Welfare, and served or serves on numerous Editorial Boards, including the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and the World Bank Economic Review. Mr. Basu’s contributions to economics span development economics, welfare economics, industrial organization and public economics. He has published widely and his most recent books are Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics published by Princeton University Press and Penguin, and An Economist’s Miscellany, published by Oxford University Press. He is the second World Bank Chief Economist from a developing country.
