2017 Leontief Prize Winners:
James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier
Awardees to lecture on the theme:
“Economics, Equity, and the Environment”
March 28, 2017
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall 2nd floor, Tufts University, Medford, MA
GDAE will award its 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought to James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier. This year’s award, titled “Economics, Equity, and the Environment,” recognizes Boyce and Martinez-Alier for their ground-breaking theoretical and applied work that has effectively integrated ecological, developmental, and justice-oriented approaches into the field of economics.
“It is essential to address the ecological crisis generated by the old-paradigm economy,” said GDAE Co-Director Neva Goodwin. “James Boyce and Joan Martinez-Alier have highlighted the relationship between economic systems, resources (materials and energy) and social issues. Their particular focus on the intersections among economics, poverty, and inequality has strongly informed GDAE’s thinking on these issues.”
GDAE awards the Leontief Prize each year to leading theorists who have developed innovative work in economics that addresses contemporary realities and supports just and sustainable societies.
The ceremony and lectures by the awardees will be followed by a reception.
Dr. James K. Boyce is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and director of the Program on Development, Peacebuilding and the Environment at the Political Economy Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University. Dr. Boyce’s current work focuses on strategies for combining poverty reduction with environmental protection, and on the relationships between inequality and environmental degradation. Since 2011 he has served as the president of Econ4: Economics for People, the Planet and the Future.
Dr. Joan Martinez-Alier is an emeritus professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he received his Ph.D. in 1976. During his career, he has held positions at Oxford University, Stanford University, University of California-Davis, FLACSO, and Yale University. Most recently he has served as co-director of the EJAtlas and currently directs the EnvJustice Project at ICTA-UAB (2016-2021) on ecological distribution conflicts and the global movement for environmental justice. He has played a crucial role in the development of ecological economics and served as a founding member and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics.
About the Leontief Prize
GDAE inaugurated its economics award in 2000 in memory of Nobel Prize-winning economist and GDAE advisory board member Wassily Leontief. The Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought recognizes economists whose work, like that of the institute and Leontief himself, combines theoretical and empirical research to promote a more comprehensive understanding of social and environmental processes. The inaugural prizes were awarded in 2000 to John Kenneth Galbraith and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.
GDAE was founded in 1993 with the goal of promoting a better understanding of how societies can pursue their economic and community goals in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner. The Institute develops textbooks and course materials, published on paper and on its web site, that incorporates a broad understanding of social, financial and environmental sustainability. The Institute also carries out policy-relevant research on climate change, the role of the market in environmental policy, and globalization and sustainable development.
In addition to Amartya Sen and John Kenneth Galbraith, GDAE has awarded the Leontief Prize to Paul Streeten, Herman Daly, Alice Amsden, Dani Rodrik, Nancy Folbre, Robert Frank, Richard Nelson, Ha-Joon Chang, Samuel Bowles, Juliet Schor, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Stephen DeCanio, José Antonio Ocampo, Robert Wade, Bina Agarwal, Daniel Kahneman, Martin Weitzman, Nicholas Stern, Michael Lipton, C. Peter Timmer, Albert O. Hirschman (posthumous), Frances Stewart, Angus Deaton, James K. Galbraith, Duncan Foley, Lance Taylor, Amit Bhaduri, and Diane Elson.
