Sachs, Jeffrey D. 1954-

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SACHS, Jeffrey D. 1954-

PERSONAL: Born 1954, in Detroit, MI. Education: Harvard College, B.A., 1976; Harvard University, M.A., 1978, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES: Office—The Earth Institute at Columbia University, 405 Low Library, MC 4335, 535 W. 116th St., New York, NY 10027. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, economist, and educator. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant professor, 1980–82, associate professor, 1982, professor of economics, 1983–2002, Galen L. Stone professor of international trade and director of Center for International Development; Columbia University, New York, NY, Quetelet professor of sustainable development, professor of economics, international and public affairs, and health policy and management, and director of Earth Institute, 2002–; United Nations, director of UN Millennium Project and special advisor to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. National Bureau of Economic Research, research associated. International Financial Institutions advisory commission member, 1999–2000; World Health Organization, chairman of Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, 2000–01. Brookings Panel of Economists, fellow.

MEMBER: Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, World Econometric Society (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS: Named among world's fifty most important leaders on globalization by French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur; named among 100 most influential people in the world, Time, 2004, 2005; named among 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy, World Affairs Council of America; honorary degrees from St. Gallen University (Switzerland), Lingnan College of Hong Kong, Varna Economics University (Bulgaria), and Iona College (New York, NY); honorary professorship at Universidad del Pacifico (Peru); Frank E. Seidman Award in Political Economy, 1991; Bernhard Harms Prize, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(With Michael Bruno) Macroeconomic Adjustment with Import Price Shocks: Real and Monetary Aspects, Institute for International Economic Studies (Stockholm, Sweden), 1979.

Theoretical Issues in International Borrowing, International Finance Section, Department of Economics, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), 1984.

(With Michael Bruno) Economics of Worldwide Stagflation, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1985.

New Approaches to the Latin-American Debt Crisis, International Finance Section, Department of Economics, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), 1989.

(Editor) Developing Country Debt and the World Economy, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1989.

Efficient Debt Reduction, Country Economics Department, World Bank (Washington, DC), 1989.

Que se piensa en el exterior de la political económica Venezolana, Academia Nacional de Ciencias Económicas (Caracas, Venezuela), 1989.

(Editor) Developing Country Debt and Economic Performance, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1989.

Social Conflict and Populist Policies in Latin America, ICS Press (San Francisco, CA), 1990.

(With Warwick J. McKibbin) Global Linkages: Macroeconomic Interdependence and Cooperation in the World Economy, Brookings Institution (Washington, DC), 1991.

(Editor, with Carlos E. Paredes) Peru's Path to Recovery: A Plan for Economic Stabilization and Growth, Brookings Institution (Washington, DC), 1991.

Poland's Jump to the Market Economy, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1993.

(With Larrain B. Felipe) Macroeconomics in the Global Economy, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1993.

(Editor, with Olivier Jean Blanchard and Kenneth A. Froot) The Transition in Eastern Europe, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1994.

(Editor, with Katharina Pistor) The Rule of Law and Economic Reform in Russia, Westview (Boulder, CO), 1997.

(Editor, with Wing Thye Woo and Stephen Parker) Economics in Transition: Comparing Asia and Eastern Europe, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1997.

(Co-editor) The Africa Competitiveness Report 1998, World Economic Forum (Geneva, Switzerland), 1998.

(Co-editor) The Global Competitiveness Report 1998, World Economic Forum (Geneva, Switzerland), 1998.

(With Katharina Pistor and Philip A. Wellons) The Role of Law and Legal Institutions in Asian Economic Development: 1960–1995, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor, with Ashutosh Varshney and Nirupan Bajpai) India in the Era of Economic Reforms, Oxford University Press (New Delhi, India), 1999.

(Co-editor) The Global Competitiveness Report 1999, World Economic Forum (Geneva, Switzerland), 1999.

(Co-editor) The Asia Competitiveness Report 1999, World Economic Forum (Geneva, Switzerland), 1999.

(Editor, with Wing Thye Woo and Klaus Schwab) The Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons for a Resilient Asia, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2000, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Macroeonomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development, World Health Organization (Geneva, Switzerland), 2001.

(Co-editor) The Africa Competitiveness Report 2000/2001, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Richard G. Feachem) Global Public Goods for Health: The Report of Working Group Two of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, World Health Organization (Geneva, Switzerland), 2002.

(Co-editor) The Latin-American Competitiveness Report 2001–2002, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Co-editor) The Global Competitiveness Report 2001–2002, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Author of foreword) Xiaokai Yang, Economics Development and the Division of Labor, Blackwell Publishers (Malden, MA), 2003.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin (New York, NY), 2005.

Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, UN Millennium Project, Earthscan (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to volumes, including U.S.-Canadian Trade and Investment Relations with Japan, edited by Robert M. Stern, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1989; The Breakup of the Soviet Union: Opposing Viewpoints, edited by David Bender and Bruno Leone, Greenhaven Press (San Diego, CA), 1994; Russian Economic Reform at Risk, edited by Anders Aslund, Pinter (London, England), 1995; The Rising Tide: The Leading Minds of Business and Economics Chart a Course toward Higher Growth and Prosperity, John Wiley and Sons (New York, NY), 1997; Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, edited by Gordon L. Clark, Maryann P. Feldman, and Meric S. Gertler, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000; Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2000; Technology and the New Economy, edited by Chong-En Bai and Chi-Wa Yuen, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002; Economic and Financial Crises in Emerging Market Economies, edited by Martin Feldstein, NBER (Cambridge, MA), 2003; Pandemic: Facing AIDS, Umbrage Editions (New York, NY), 2003; and Globalization: What's New, edited by Michael M. Weinstein, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2005. Guest contributing editor, Human Development Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A Compact among Nations to End Human Poverty, UNDP (New York, NY), 2003. Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Economics, and Financial Times. Author of syndicated newspaper column that appears in more than fifty countries.

SIDELIGHTS: One of the more prominent economists and social thinkers in the world today, Jeffrey D. Sachs is a prolific author, educator, and advisor to world governments and international organizations. He has served as economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. He has consulted with a variety of worldwide agencies on economic and social problems, such as poverty reduction, debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries, and disease control in nations particularly susceptible to the effects of disease. Sachs has served as advisor to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Health Organization. As director of the U.N. Millennium Project, Sachs helped develop the Millennium Development Goals, a series of practical guidelines and goals designed to eliminate extreme world poverty by the year 2015. Consistently recognized as one of the world's top economists and intellectuals, Sachs is the author of dozens of books, more than 200 scholarly articles, and a syndicated newspaper column.

With The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Sachs "has written a book of enormous rhetorical power," remarked Bill McKibben in Christian Century. "He convincingly presents world poverty as a manageable problem; indeed, he offers a plausible and very nearly painless plan for dealing with it, and all with an unruffled self-confidence that can't help sweeping a reader up in his optimism."

Sachs's goal is not the eradication of the state of being poor; instead, it is the elimination of what he calls "extreme poverty," a situation rampant throughout Africa and South Asia in which people subsist on an equivalent income of one dollar or less per day. Almost a billion people share this plight, McKibben noted. Sachs's solution does not seek a total handout. Instead, he looks to alleviate the crushing poverty of the world's poorest nations by improving, even slightly, the economic position of their citizens. Once they have attained a particular level of economic achievement—defined by Sachs as "moderate poverty," an income equivalent to one to two dollars per day—they will be in a position to enter the economy and help themselves.

To make this happen, Sachs endorses the use of well-known technologies and proven techniques. At first, simple solutions are the most effective, such as the wider use of mosquito nets to curb insect-borne disease; increased access to AIDS drugs and treatments; and clean wells for safe drinking water. To go further, Sachs notes that increased foreign aid will be necessary. "Basically," Sachs said in an interview in Journal of International Affairs, "we're advocating a change from business-as-usual that can be summarized as a big scaling-up of investments in three critical areas: 1) investment in people, which means investments in health, education, nutrition and family planning; 2) investment in the environment, mainly investment in soils, land, water and biodiversity conservation; and 3) investment in infrastructure—power, roads, motor transport, port facilities, communications." These improvements, generated by increased investments by wealthier nations, "should enable the poorest countries to break out of the 'poverty trap,' to begin self-sustaining economic growth within the decade and to achieve the MDGs in particular by 2015," Sachs stated.

The plan to eliminate extreme poverty in the world would require aid from the planet's richer nations, but Sachs does not suggest an exorbitant amount of giving. The goals could be reached by donor country contributions of only 0.7 percent of their gross national product. However, many countries, even ones who have endorsed the Millennium Development Goals, are failing to uphold their pledges of aid. The United States, Sachs notes, is chief among them. "In general the level of donor assistance is flagrantly inadequate compared to what has been promised and compared to what is needed," he noted in an Africa News Service interview. The United States' share should be approximately 175 billion dollars per year, but U.S. aid remains fixed at about fifty billion dollars annually. "In terms of how far countries are from this international goal, the United States unfortunately is the farthest away," Sachs remarked.

"Though ridding the world of poverty may not be as politically incendiary or galvanizing as the war on terror, Sachs argues that it is just as important—not only for altruistic reasons but for long-term global economic security as well," remarked Newsweek International contributor Aaron Clark.

Sachs acknowledges that there are some countries in which the political situation makes attainment of any appreciable development unlikely, a concern that accounts for some reluctance on the part of the United States. "There are some cases where the corruption is so massive that unless you are really, really clever and come up with some radically new approach to the issue, you're going to have a hard time accomplishing many development goals," he observed in an interview in Mother Jones. But, he argues, solving problems of governmental corruption in developing nations should come after solving practical problems related to basic health and welfare.

"Sachs's case is difficult to resist," noted Tim Congdon in the Spectator. "He is surely right that a small amount of well-directed money in sub-Saharan Africa could give huge returns in terms of disease control." In other areas, his "carefully constructed plan for improving local infrastructure, education, healthcare, technology, and other such needs in poor countries" augurs well for genuine improvements that are not only feasible, but practical, commented Lawrence R. Maxted in Library Journal. "Sachs's plan should cheer not just soft-hearted liberals, but also every conservative with a conscience and a calculator: if this is the price for bringing the entire world into the ambit of the modern economic system, what argument could there be against it? None, really—only a churl could read this book and say no," McKibben stated. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called The End of Poverty "a landmark book," concluding that "If there is any one work to put extreme poverty back onto the global agenda, this is it." The technologies that underlie Sachs's very real vision of global economic improvement "are known and the strategies proved," Clark stated. "What is needed is simply the political and financial will to implement them."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Africa News Service, July 28, 2003, "Interview With Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, UN Special Adviser on Millennium Goals," p. 1022.

America's Intelligence Wire, March 12, 2005, "Top U.N. Anti-Poverty Expert Jeffrey Sachs Hails Britain's Help-Africa Effort."

Booklist, February 15, 2005, Mary Whaley, review of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, p. 1043.

Christian Century, May 31, 2005, Bill McKibben, "Poor No More: Strategies of Global Development," review of The End of Poverty, p. 22.

Journal of International Affairs, spring, 2005, Sara Regine Hassett and Christine Weydig, "An Interview with Jeffrey D. Sachs," p. 1.

Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2005, review of The End of Poverty, p. 111.

Library Journal, May 1, 2005, Lawrence R. Maxted, review of The End of Poverty, p. 98.

Mother Jones, May 6, 2005, Onnesha Roychoudhuri, "The End of Poverty: An Interview with Jeffrey Sachs."

New Statesman, May 16, 2005, Robert Skidelsky, review of The End of Poverty, p. 47.

Newsweek International, April 4, 2005, Aaron Clark, "Alms for the Poor: A Clear Remedy for Winning the War on Global Poverty," p. 61.

PR Newswire, April 5, 2002, "Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs, One of the World's Leading Economists, Will Head Columbia Earth Institute."

Publishers Weekly, February 7, 2005, review of The End of Poverty, p. 51.

Spectator, May 7, 2005, Tim Congdon, "Charity Hopeth All Things," review of The End of Poverty, p. 57.

Time, April 26, 2004, Charles Alexander, "Jeffrey Sachs: Economentalist," p. 116; April 18, 2005, Bono, "Jeffrey Sachs: The People's Economist," p. 110.