London: Sir Partha Dasgupta, one of the world's leading economists, has joined the University of Manchester.

Dasgupta, an expert on international development and the environment, will teach 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 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,” he said.

"The World Bank and UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 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 organisations have espoused over the years have failed to do much to reduce poverty," Dagupta added.

Dasgupta was knighted in 2002 for services to economics and has been President of the Royal Economic Society and the European Economic Association.

A Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society, Dasgupta is famous for having pioneered the development of sophisticated measures of wealth, saving and consumption to include environmental impacts of human activity so as to assess whether contemporary economic development is sustainable.

 

Source : ians