rd.
5. Hernando de Soto Polar
During his prestigious career, Hernando de Soto Polar has contributed significantly to economic and political change in his native country of Peru. During the ‘80s and ‘90s, he and his think tank, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (IDL), were responsible for numerous reforms of the Peruvian economic and property systems. These included allowing previously black market groups to enter the legitimate economy.
De Soto’s work gained the attention of Maoist Peruvian terrorist group The Shining Path when he granted titles to smaller coca farmers, allegedly depriving the guerrillas of supplies, money, and recruits. The group’s leader, Abimael Guzmán, saw the IDL as a threat, and de Soto was added to their hit list. In July 1992, a car bomb exploded inside the ILD headquarters in Lima. Three people were killed and 19 were injured in the attack.
In May 1999, de Soto was selected by Time as one of their top five Latin American innovators of the century. And in 2004, the magazine included him on their 100 Most Influential People in the World list. United States presidents Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan have also praised de Soto’s work.
4. Jagdish Bhagwati
Jagdish Bhagwati is a highly decorated Indian-American economist and a current professor of economics and law at Columbia University. During his illustrious career, Bhagwati has served as an external adviser to the Director General of the World Trade Organization and as a special policy advisor on globalization to the UN. He has also worked as an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology.
Bhagwati’s most famous work has been in the field of liberalization, and he is credited with helping to significantly liberalize global trade. His work advising the Indian government was instrumental in ending their socialist policies and creating a genuinely free market in the country.
Bhagwati was one of the economists tipped to win the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, although, in a somewhat controversial result, the award went to Paul Krugman. It was suggested that Krugman’s high-profile criticism of George W. Bush may have aided his victory, but the prize committee denied that politics had had any influence on their choice of recipient.
3. William R. Easterly
Professor William Easterly, a former World Bank economist and senior advisor, has attempted to debunk conventional ideas about foreign aid with a series of controversial books.
In The Elusive Quest for Growth, Easterly argues that attempts to end poverty in the Third World are doomed to fail because they do not give the established institutions sufficient incentives to cooperate. He elaborates on this theme in his follow-up book, The White Man’s Burden.
Easterley is critical of “top-down” attempts to bring aid to countries and argues that attempts to do so equate to crypto-colonialism. He describes top-down donors as utopian “Planners” and prefers a bottom-up “Searchers” approach, which he describes as more realistic.
The White Man’s Burden won an FA Hayek Award from the Manhattan Institute in 2008. Currently, Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University and the co-director of the university’s Development Research Institute. His other roles include associate editor work and being a “non-resident senior fellow” at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
2. Roger W. Garrison
Roger Garrison is a professor of economics at Auburn University in Alabama. He is also a scholar of American libertarian academic organization, the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His specific area of interest is macroeconomics.
Garrison graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1974 with a master’s degree in economics, and he earned his PhD at the University of Virginia in 1981. He has taught all over the world, but is probably most famous for his book Time and Money, which offers a harsh criticism of Keynesian graphical analysis and provides a graphical outline for capital-based macroeconomics.
Garrison is a follower of the Austrian School of economics, which ba