Indian-origin economists transformed American thinking on trade, poverty, and development. Columbia University’s Jagdish Bhagwati became the leading academic advocate of free trade. Harvard’s Amartya Sen received the 1998 Nobel Prize for developing the capabilities approach, reshaping how wellbeing is measured beyond economic output. In 2019, MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Prize for pioneering randomized controlled trials in development economics through J-PAL, a methodology now widely adopted in American policy research and global development practice.
