INSEE–SANDEE Karl Göran Mäler memorial lecture

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About the speaker

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Professorial Research Fellow at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester. Although Prof. Dasgupta has worked on research problems in a number of fields, his long-standing interest has been ecological economics. Not only is his work is marked by theoretical rigour and philosophical depth, but also by intensive policy engagement and an abiding concern for human wellbeing. Prof. Dasgupta had a long-standing collaboration with the late Karl-Göran Mäler, with whom he developed the concept of “inclusive wealth” as a measure of human well-being. Through their extensive writings, Dasgupta and Mäler have mounted an influential critique of the economics of poverty and development that does not acknowledge humanity’s embeddedness in and reliance upon nature.

In 2011, the Indian Prime Minister directed the setting up on an expert group under the chairmanship of Prof. Dasgupta to develop a framework of green national accounts for India and a roadmap for its implementation. More recently, Prof. Dasgupta led a report on the economics

of biodiversity, commissioned by the UK government: The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review (2021). An important objective of the report was to develop a new measure to account for the capital inherent in the natural world (economists today call that “natural capital”) that could be used as an element in, among other things, the evaluation of investment projects and assessment of the sustainability of economic programmes.

Agenda