The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Economics,
#1
Janet Yellen
#297
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Janet Louise Yellen is an American economist serving as the 78th United States secretary of the treasury since January 26, 2021. She previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. She is the first person to hold those positions having also led the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the first woman to hold either post.
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Anna Schwartz
#564
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Anna Jacobson Schwartz was an American economist who worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and a writer for The New York Times. Paul Krugman has said that Schwartz is "one of the world's greatest monetary scholars."
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Elinor Ostrom
#264
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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Esther Duflo
#921
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
#5
Robin Wells
#3313
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Robin Elizabeth Wells is an American economist. She is the co-author of several economics texts, mostly with her husband Paul Krugman. Life and career Wells received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Wells did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught or done research at the University of Michigan, the University of Southampton, Stanford University, MIT, and Princeton University.
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Claudia Goldin
#855
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes,” as well as the root causes of the gender pay gap. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.
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Christine Lagarde
#332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde is a French politician and lawyer who has served as President of the European Central Bank since 2019. She previously served as the 11th Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2019. Lagarde had also served in the Government of France, most prominently as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry from 2007 until 2011. She is the first woman to hold each of those posts.
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Anne Osborn Krueger
#4633
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Anne Osborn Krueger is an American economist. She was the World Bank Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2006. She is currently the senior research professor of international economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. She also is a senior fellow of Center for International Development and the Herald L. and Caroline Ritch Emeritus Professor of Sciences and Humanities' Economics Department at Stanford University.
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Victoria Chick
#9181
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Victoria Chick was a Post Keynesian economist known for her essays on monetary theory, banking and methodology. Her writing on Keynes's General Theory made her one of the foremost interpreters of his work. After the 2008 banking crisis she coined a corollary to Gresham's Law, arguing that in orthodox economics "bad theory drives out good."
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Melissa Dell
#5325
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Melissa Dell is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history. In 2014, the International Monetary Fund named Dell among the 25 Brightest Young Economists. In 2018, she was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the Calvó-Armengol International Prize; The Economist also named her one of "the decade’s eight best young economists." She was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2020.
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Christina Romer
#2248
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christina Duckworth Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.
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Nancy Stokey
#7038
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Laura Stokey has been the Frederick Henry Prince Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago since 1990 and focuses particularly on mathematical economics while recently conducting research about Growth Theory, economic dynamics, and fiscal/monetary policy. She earned her BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1978, under the direction of thesis advisor Kenneth Arrow. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She prev...
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Kristalina Georgieva
#1084
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kristalina Ivanova Georgieva-Kinova is a Bulgarian economist serving as the 12th managing director of the International Monetary Fund since 2019. She was the Chief Executive of the World Bank Group from 2017 to 2019 and served as Acting President of the World Bank Group from 1 February to 8 April 2019 following the resignation of Jim Yong Kim. She previously served as Vice-President of the European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2016.
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Julie A. Nelson
#7130
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#15
Gita Gopinath
#6432
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist who has served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund , since 21 January 2022. She had previously served as chief economist of the IMF between 2019 and 2022.
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Carmen Reinhart
#3318
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carmen M. Reinhart is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is als...
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Ursula von der Leyen
#141
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German physician and politician serving as the 13th president of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding successive positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as minister of defence. Von der Leyen is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its EU affiliated group, the European People's Party .
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Susan Athey
#6600
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Susan Carleton Athey is an American economist. She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She served as the consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and was a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research. She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action.
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Anne Case
#4871
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Anne Catherine Case, Lady Deaton, is an American economist who is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emeritus, at Princeton University. Early life and career Case graduated with a BA degree from the State University of New York at Albany in 1980, and subsequently obtained an MPA degree in 1983 and a PhD in economics in 1988, both from Princeton University. After working as an assistant professor in the department of economics at Harvard University from 1988-1991, she has worked in departments of economics at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wil...
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Mariana Mazzucato
#3905
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#21
Margaret Thatcher
#323
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher , was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving of the 20th century. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies that became known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
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Betsey Stevenson
#7227
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Betsey Ayer Stevenson is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and servers on the board of the American Economic Association. The Obama Administration announced her appointment as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, a post she served from 2013 through 2015. She previously served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under Secretary Hilda Solis from 2010 to 2011.
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Maria da Conceição Tavares
#6858
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Maria da Conceição Tavares is a Portuguese naturalized Brazilian economist. She is a full professor at the State University of Campinas and professor emeritus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro . Her students have included the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. Tavares is affiliated with the Workers' Party, and she was a Federal Deputy representing the state of Rio de Janeiro between 1995 and 1999. Left-wing focused, she is the author of several books on Brazil's economic development as well as numerous journal articles.
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Stephanie Kelton
#5819
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Stephanie A Kelton is an American heterodox economist and academic, and a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory. She served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and worked for the Senate Budget Committee under his chairmanship. She is also the author of The Deficit Myth, a New York Times bestseller, on the subject of Modern Monetary Theory.
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Anita Summers
#9921
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Anita Arrow Summers was an American educator of public policy, management, real estate and education and was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Anita Arrow was born in New York City on September 9, 1925. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Romania, Summers received a B.A. in Economics from Hunter College in 1945 and an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1947. She earned an honorary doctorate from Hunter College. She married Robert Summers in 1953 and left the workforce to raise three sons.
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Isabel Schnabel
#7806
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Isabel Schnabel is a German economist who has been serving as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank since 2020. She became professor of financial economics at the University of Bonn in 2015 and a member of the German Council of Economic Experts in 2014. She worked previously at the University of Mainz from 2007 to 2015.
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Amy Finkelstein
#10437
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Amy Nadya Finkelstein is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. She was awarded the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal for her contributions to economics. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.
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Laura Tyson
#4153
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Laura D'Andrea Tyson is an American economist and university administrator who is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She served as the 16th Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd Director of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton. Tyson was the first woman to hold each of those posts. She remains the only person to have served in both posts.
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Graciela Chichilnisky
#8495
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Graciela Chichilnisky is an Argentine American mathematical economist. She is a professor of economics at Columbia University and has expertise in climate change. She is also co-founder and former CEO of the company Global Thermostat.
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Keyu Jin
#5720
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Jin Keyu is a Chinese economist, associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, specialising in international macroeconomics and the Chinese economy. Her research focuses on global trade imbalances, global asset prices and China's economic growth model.
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Edith Penrose
#5487
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Edith Elura Tilton Penrose was an American-born British economist whose best known work is The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, which describes the ways which firms grow and how fast they do. Writing in The Independent, the economist Sir Alec Cairncross stated that the book brought Dr. Penrose "instant recognition as a creative thinker, and its importance to the analysis of the job of management has been increasingly realized".
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Carlota Perez
#6358
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Carlota Perez is a British-Venezuelan scholar specialized in technology and socio-economic development. She researches the concept of Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts and the theory of great surges, a further development of Schumpeter's work on Kondratieff waves. In 2012 she was awarded the Silver Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and in 2021 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Utrecht University.
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Kate Raworth
#10458
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Kate Raworth is an English economist known for "doughnut economics", an economic model that balances between essential human needs and planetary boundaries. Raworth is senior associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and a Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
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Jayati Ghosh
#6059
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jayati Ghosh is an Indian development economist. She is the Chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her core areas of study include international economics, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.
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Rachel Kranton
#11510
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Rachel E. Kranton is an American economist and James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Science, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and 2010 recipient of the Blaise Pascal Chair. She was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association from 2015 to 2018. Kranton's research focuses on how social institutions affect economic outcomes, and has applications in a variety of fields within economics, such as economic development, international economics, and industrial...
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Neva Goodwin
#9170
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Neva Goodwin Rockefeller , known professionally as Neva Goodwin, is co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, where she is a research associate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being.
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Emi Nakamura
#19622
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Emi Nakamura is a Canadian-American economist. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Nakamura is a research associate and co-director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review.
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Bina Agarwal
#6379
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bina Agarwal is an Indian development economist and Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. She has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation.
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Ester Boserup
#3564
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Ester Boserup was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and wrote seminal books on agrarian change and the role of women in development.
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Diana Strassmann
#20702
Overall Influence
Diana Louise Strassmann is an American economist, currently Carolyn and Fred McManis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Rice University, and also co-founder of International Association for Feminist Economics and its journal Feminist Economics.
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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
#2141
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a Nigerian-American economist, who has been serving as the Director-General of the World Trade Organization since March 2021. Notably, she is the first woman and first African to lead the World Trade Organization as Director-General. She sits on boards of: Danone, Standard Chartered Bank, MINDS: Mandela Institute for Development Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, One Campaign, GAVI: Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, Rockefeller Foundation, R4D: Results for Development, ARC: African Risk ...
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Laurence Boone
#10889
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Laurence Boone is a French economist who has been serving as the Secretary of State for European affairs in the government of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne since 2022. Boone’s fields of interest include macroeconomics, European politics and public finance. She served as an economic advisor to President François Hollande between July 2014 and March 2016.
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Katy Milkman
#10464
Overall Influence
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
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Pavlina R. Tcherneva
#19072
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an American economist, of Bulgarian descent, working as associate professor of economics at Bard College. She is also a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute and expert at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
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Naomi Lamoreaux
#11744
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Naomi Raboy Lamoreaux is an American economic historian, specializing in US business and technological history. She is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and History of Economics and History at Yale University and an emeritus professor at UCLA and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has worked widely on business, economic, and financial history with perhaps her most noted works being her 1988 book The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 and her 1996 book Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections and her Economic Development in Industrial New England.
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Nancy Birdsall
#10422
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nancy Birdsall is an American economist, the founding president of the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. She co-founded CGD in November 2001 with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott Jr. and served as president until 2016. Prior to becoming the President of CGD, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as the reform of the international financial institutions.
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Karen Dynan
#20928
Overall Influence
Karen Dynan is an American economist who is Professor of the Practice of Economics at Harvard University and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the United States Department of the Treasury, having been nominated to that position by President Barack Obama in August 2013 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in June 2014. From 2009 to 2013, Dr. Dynan was the Vice President and Co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution.
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Linda Yueh
#16517
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Linda Yi-Chuang Yueh is a British/American economist, broadcaster, and author, born in Taiwan and of dual British and American citizenship. Yueh is an adjunct professor of economics at London Business School, and a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. She was also a Visiting Professor at Peking University and associated with both the Centre for Economic Performance and IDEAS research centres at the London School of Economics . She is a TV and radio presenter, including for BBC programmes such as Radio 4 Analysis, Business Daily on BBC World Service, and Radio 4 Today programme.
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Ailsa McKay
#14127
Overall Influence
1963 - 2014 (51 years)
Ailsa McKay was a Scottish economist, government policy adviser, a leading feminist economist and Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University. She was noted for her research on gender inequalities and the economics of the welfare state, for her contributions to feminist economics, as a leading proponent of the universal basic income concept and as one of the UK's foremost experts on gender budgeting. She served as Vice Dean of the Glasgow School for Business and Society, and was also well known for her support of Scottish independence and as a key adviser to the Scottish government and First Minister Alex Salmond on economic and welfare state policies.
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Alice Amsden
#15087
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
Alice Hoffenberg Amsden was a political economist and scholar of state-led economic development. For the last two decades of her career, she was the Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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