Joan Martinez Alier
Joan Martinez Alier (born 1939, Barcelona, Spain) is a Catalan economist, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and researcher at ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has made important contributions in ecological economics and political ecology, which he synthesised in his work on environmentalism of the poor. Biography Martinez Alier has a Lic. Economics, Universitat de Barcelona (1961), after which he went abroad to escape Francoist Spain, and studied agricultural economics at Oxford University and Stanford. He then received a scholarship to return to Oxford (B.Litt. St Antony's College, 1967). His PhD was in Economics from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1976). He cooperated with the exile publishing house Ruedo Iberico in Paris between 1966 and 1979. He remained as a researcher at St. Antony's College Oxford into the early 70s (1966–73 and 1984–85), working on agrarian conflicts, land reform, rural unemployment and the capitalist logic of sharecropping in Southern Spain and also conducting research in Cuba (on smallholders in the early years of Castro's administration); and in Peru (on the hacienda peasantry). He was visiting professor at the State University of Campinas (Brasil) in 1974, before returning to his home town to join the Department of