Sir Arthur Lewis
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Sir Arthur Lewis
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1979
Born: 23 January 1915, Castries, British West Indies (now Saint Lucia)
Died: 15 June 1991, Bridgetown, Barbados
Affiliation at the time of the award: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Arthur Lewis was born in Castries, Saint Lucia. A gifted student, he won a scholarship to study in Great Britain in 1932, and went to the London School of Economics. He graduated in 1937, and in 1948 he was recruited as a professor at the University of Manchester. In 1963, he moved to the United States to work at Princeton University, where he stayed for the next two decades.
Work
Arthur Lewis was a leading figure and pioneer in the field of economic development. Lewis created two theoretical explanatory models designed to describe and explain the intrinsic problems of underdevelopment. The first model is based on the dual nature of a developing economy. Lewis’s other basic models relates to the determination of the terms of trade between developing and developed countries.
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