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Duration: 00:58:03

ABOUT THE LECTURE:

Established in 1997, the Arnold C. Harberger Distinguished Lecture on Economic Development celebrates Al Harberger as an eminent scholar and teacher. The lectures provide a special forum for outstanding students of international economics and policy to present their views and research to the UCLA community and the public. Arnold Harberger's pioneering studies on taxation, development, cost benefit analysis, and trade policy have marked him as an economist with incredible breadth, from theory to policy, from the United States to developing countries. His outstanding work is reflected, inter alia, in four publications: Project Evaluation (1972), Taxation and Welfare (1974), World Economic Growth (1984), and Trade Policy and the Real Exchange Rate (1985). In these works, Harberger first elaborated the theory of cost-benefit analysis as applied by modern governments. This was followed by analyses of issues of taxation and trade policy, mainly focused on the developing countries. Abroad, he has worked on policy matters with the governments of a wide range of countries, including China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada and every country in Latin America, except Cuba and Peru. In every case, his influence has helped to create, maintain and extend the wave of liberalization that is sweeping developing economies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D. Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.