The economist who has quantified “the social value of nature”

As the jury explained, Dasgupta laid the foundations “to define and measure sustainable development”, including “the social value of nature” as a determining variable. Unlike flow-based measures of well-being such as gross domestic product, Dasgupta proposed measuring sustainable development as the change in the book value of total wealth, including natural capital in that indicator. “These ideas – concludes the minutes that include the ruling – have provided a framework for green accounting that is now widely accepted to measure sustainable development.”

For Lucrezia Reichlin, professor of Economics at the London Business School and member of the jury, the key to Dasgupta’s work lies in two questions that he defends: the first is “that what is important to correctly measure sustainable development is wealth throughout of time, and not at a specific moment as shown by flow indicators such as GDP”; and the second, “that this measurement of wealth must incorporate the value of natural resources, but not measured by market prices, since these have externalities that undervalue them, but rather through the social value of natural capital.”

“Fundamental studies for today”

Dasgupta’s research and his proposals for measuring economic well-being “are fundamental today,” according to Eric Maskin, president of the jury and Nobel Prize winner in Economics: “He is the economist of our time who has most emphasized the important interaction between life economic and the natural environment. In his work he emphasizes that all economic activity has implications for our environment, almost always negative, and that these implications must be taken into account to formulate and carry out an economic policy that really makes sense not only for the people of today’s world, but also for future generations.

Son of the also famous economist Amiya Kumar Dasgupta, Sir Partha Dasgupta was born in 1942 in Dhaka, then British India, and was raised mainly in Benares (India). He graduated in Physics from the University of Delhi (India) in 1962 and in Mathematics from Cambridge (United Kingdom) in 1965. In 1968 he received a doctorate in Economics from the same University, whose Trinity Hall he joined as a researcher. He is now emeritus holder of the Frank Ramsey Chair in Economics at Cambridge and a fellow of St John’s College of the same university.

Between 1978 and 1984 he taught economics at the London School of Economics (United Kingdom) and between 1989 and 1992 at Stanford University (United States), where he also directed the Ethics and Society program, before returning to Cambridge in 1994. From 2007 to 2013 he was the Andrew D. White Professor at Cornell University (United States). Since 1989 he has been a member of the British Academy and since 2004 of the Royal Society (United Kingdom). He is also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2022 he was named “Champion of the Earth” by the United Nations – the first economist to receive this distinction –, making him the first economist to receive this distinction. In 2023 he was made a Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire for “his services to the economy and the environment.”

In this edition, 59 nominations were received for this category. The award-winning researcher was nominated by Leonardo Felli, Dean of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards are endowed with 400,000 euros in each of its eight categories. Its objective is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without borders, which benefits all humanity because it is the best tool we have to face the great global challenges of our time and expand the world vision of each individual. . Its eight categories range from basic knowledge to fields dedicated to understanding the natural environment, including areas such as Biology, Medicine and Economics, information technologies, social sciences, humanities and music.