the economist

This book examines the life and work of Ajit Singh (1940-2015), a leading radical post-Keynesian applied economist who made major contributions to the policy-oriented study of both developed and developing economies, and was a key figure in the life and evolution of the Cambridge Faculty of Economics. Unorthodox, outspoken, and invariably rigorous, Ajit Singh made highly significant contributions to industrial economics, corporate governance and finance, and stock markets - developing empirically sound refutations of neoclassical tenets. He was much respected for his challenges both to orthodox economics, and to the one-size-fits-all free-market policy prescriptions of the Bretton Woods institutions in relation to late-industrialising developing economies. Throughout his career, Ajit remained an analyst and apostle of State-enabled accelerated industrialisation as the key to transformative development in the post-colonial Global South. The author traces Ajit Singh's radical perspectives to their roots in the early post-colonial nationalist societal aspirations for self-determination and autonomous and rapid egalitarian development - whether in his native Punjab, India, or the third world - and further explores the nuanced interface between Ajit's simultaneous affinity, seemingly paradoxical, both with socialism and Sikhism.
This intellectual biography will appeal to students and researchers in Development Economics, History of Economic Thought, Development Studies, and Post-Keynesian Economics, as well as to policy makers and development practitioners in the fields of industrialisation, development and finance within the strategic framework of contemporary globalisation.

​Ashwani Saith is Emeritus Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Netherlands. He has held positions at the Delhi School of Economics; Faculty of Economics, Cambridge University, where he took his PhD; Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University; and at the London School of Economics where he was the first Chair of Development Studies and Director of its Development Studies Institute. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals, and published extensively on the political economy of development and on economic history.