Partha Dasgupta was born in 1942 in India and educated in Varanasi, Delhi, and Cambridge (PhD in Economics, 1968). He taught at the London School of Economics (1971-1984) and was Professor of Economics (1985-1994) and Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics (1994-2010) at the University of Cambridge.
His fields of research have been resource economics, the economics of poverty and undernutrition, game theory and industrial organization, and population ethics. Dasgupta’s abiding research interest for 40 years, developing economics when viewed from the population-consumption-biosphere nexus, culminated in “The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review”, a report he prepared for the UK Treasury.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society, and Foreign Member of the US Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize, the Zayed Prize for the Environment, the Blue Planet Prize, the Tyler Prize, and Kew International Medal of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. His publications include “The Control of Resources”, “An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution”, “Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment”, and “Economics: A Very Short Introduction”. Dasgupta was knighted in 2002 by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.