Prof. Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Date of Birth : 1934
Place of Birth : Mumbai



Jagdish Bhagwati, renowned professor, member of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's High-level Advisory Group and the External Advisor to the Director General World Trade Organisation (WTO), is regarded as one of the foremost international trade economists of his generation. He was born in Mumbai, India in the year 1934. He did his B.com from Mumbai in 1954 and post graduated in l956 from Cambridge University with a first in Economics Tripos. He then did his Ph.D at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1967.
After studying in England and the United States, Bhagwati returned to India in 1961 and served as Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and then as Professor of International Trade at the Delhi School of Economics. He returned to MIT in 1968, leaving it twelve years later to join Columbia, as the Ford International Professor of Economics. Bhagwati is one of the only 10 scholars who hold the title of University Professor at Columbia. On the personal front Bhagwati, is now living in America, with his wife Padma Desai, who is the Gladys and Ronald Harriman Professor Of Comparative Economic Systems at Columbia University and a scholar of Russian and other former socialist countries' transition problems. They have one daughter, Anuradha Kristina Bhagwati, a U.S. Marine officer. At 70, he is widely tipped as a future Nobel laureate, so respected among his fellow economists for his insights into the workings of foreign trade.