About
Contributors - AL19

Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen is a Nobel Laureate economist who has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and more broadly, the social sciences. Sen has devoted his career to welfare economics; to evaluating economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community. He is best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food.

Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University professor and professor of Economics and Philosophy in Harvard University. Professor Sen taught economics at a number of universities in India and England, before moving to Harvard University in 1988. In 1998 Sen was awarded Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members. 

President Martti Ahtisaari
Mr Ahtisaari’s activities post-presidency have included facilitating the peace process between the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement, chairing an independent panel on the security and safety of UN personnel in Iraq, appointments as the UN Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa and Personal Envoy of the OSCE CiO for Central Asia, and Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for the future status process for Kosovo.

President Ahtisaari is active in numerous non-governmental and non-profit organisations. In December 2008, Mr Ahtisaari was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Finn Tarp
Finn Tarp is Director of UNU-WIDER, Helsinki, Finland. He is also a professor of development economics at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. He founded the Development Economics Research Group (DERG) in 1996, and since then has co-ordinated DERG’s extensive academic research and teaching activities alongside a large portfolio of externally funded development economics research and capacity-building projects. Professor Tarp is also a member of the Council of Eminent Persons (CEP) advising the Chief Economist of the World Bank.