Rodrik named Tufts economics prize recipient:

Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute (G-DAE) announced this month that it is awarding its third annual economics prize to Alice Amsden of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dani Rodrik of Harvard for their path-breaking work on globalization and the role of the state in development. They will receive their awards at a ceremony on Nov. 21 at Tufts where they will speak on the topic, “Ruling Out National Development? States, Markets and Globalization.”

Affiliated with Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the institute inaugurated the award in 2000 in memory of Nobel Prize-winning economist and G-DAE advisory board member Wassily Leontief, who had passed away the previous year. The Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought is intended to recognize economists whose work broadens the field of economics to better comprehend urgent contemporary issues.

“As it becomes clear that the free market is leaving many behind in the current wave of globalization, Alice Amsden and Dani Rodrik are demonstrating why the theories of free trade have not measured up to their promises,” said G-DAE co-director Neva Goodwin. “Their rigorous empirical work and profound understanding of economic development is appropriately recognized in an award that bears Leontief’s name.”

Rodrik, the Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government, has written extensively on the globalization process. His empirical work on the impacts of tariff reductions and financial liberalization on developing country economies revealed a track record of economic achievement that was much more limited than had previously been acknowledged. His recent books include “Making Openness Work: The New Global Economy and the Developing Countries,” and “Has Globalization Gone Too Far?”