Dwight H. Perkins (economist)

This article is about the American economist. For the architect, see Dwight H. Perkins (architect).

Dwight Heald Perkins (born in Chicago, Illinois in 1934) is an American academic, economist, sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He is the son of Lawrence Bradford Perkins, architect, and Margery Blair Perkins and the grandson of Dwight Heald Perkins, the architect, for whom he was named. Hemarried Julie Rate Perkins in 1957 and they have three adult children.

Early life

Perkins earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University in 1956. After two years military service in the US Navy, Perkins resumed his studies at Harvard. He earned a MA in economics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1964. His doctoral thesis was "Price Formation in Communist China".[1]

Academic career

Perkins' teaching career at Harvard began when he was still a graduate student, and continued uninterrupted through 2006 when he became a research and emeritus professor.[1] He was a member of both the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and of the Harvard Kennedy School. He was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1992-1993. He has published 25 books and over 150 articles dealing both with general issues of economic development but mainly focused on the economic history and development of China, Korea, and the economies of Southeast Asia ("cv").

Perkins began his studies of China and the Chinese language as an undergraduate in 1954, but made his first visit to the People's Republic of China in 1974 as a consultant to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the United States Senate accompanying Senator Henry M. Jackson of the state of Washington. He accompanied the Senator on two subsequent trips to China in 1978 and 1979 during which the Senator and his advisors had talks with Deng Xiaoping and other senior officials of the Chinese government.("Report of Senator Henry M. Jackson to the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1979) He led a delegation of the Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People's Republic of China (CSCPRC) to study rural small-scale industry in 1975 and in 1979 he was a member of the first CSCPRC economics delegation to China led by Lawrence Klein. In over 80 trips to the People's Republic of China since then he has lectured at various universities and was made an honorary professor/researcher of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the Central China University of Science and Technology that also awarded him the Chang Peigang Award in 2010 for contributions to development economics (www.everychina.news.com). He was the first Cornelius Vander Starr Distinguished Fellow of the China Development Research Foundation in 2008 and 2009 and worked with the Foundation and the Development Research Center of the State Council in various capacities including many of the Development Forums that they ran.(cv)

In 1975-1976, Perkins served as acting director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.[2] In 1977 he became chairman of the Department of Economics of Harvard University and from 1980 through 1995 he served as director of the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and later was also director of Harvard University's Asia Center (ref Who's Who in America,1994, p. 2684, "cv"). During his tenure as director of HIID the Institute had resident advisers on macroeconomics, government management and legal reform, environmental regulation, maternal and child health, and education in the relevant ministries in 27 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe (Dwight H. Perkins, Richard Pagett, Michael Roemer, Donald Snodgrass and Joseph Stern, Assistings Development in a Changing World: The Harvard Institute for International Development, 1980-1995 (Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1997); and HIID biannual reports. Prior to becoming director he served as an advisor to the Economic Planning Unit of the Government of Malaysia in 1968 and 1969 and later (in led a team to advise the Malaysian government on civil service reform (2004-2007). In 1972 he served as an advisor to the Korea Development Institute (KDI) in Seoul during its first year and subsequently worked with KDI to jointly manage and help write research that produced more than fifteeen books on the Korean economy and society, five of which he coauthored. In 1989 he led a team to Vietnam to explore working with the Vietnamese government on their transition from a command to a market economy and in subsequent years he continued to give lectures in Vietnam and work with the government on market reforms. In 1995 as part of that effort together with Thomas Vallely of HIID and others he helped establish the Fulbright Economic Teaching Program in Ho Chi Minh City, at first a year long program of economics training for government officials and private economics personnel. He then taught two semesters in that program (1997, 1998) and gave lectures and had oversight responsibility for the program until 2009 first through HIID and subsequently with the Harvard Kennedy School. (Assisting Development in a Changing World, and various issues of The Fulbright Economics Teaching Program: Guide to Programs and Courses). He served on an advisory committee to the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea in 1991-1992, and was a member of the International Advisory Group of the Pivatization Commission and Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea in 2000-2002.(cv).

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Dwight H. Perkins, the economist, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100 works in 250+ publications in 7 languages and 6,900+ library holdings.[3]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

Notes

  1. 1 2 Harvard University, Dwight Heald Perkins CV
  2. ↑ Suleski, Ronald Stanley. (2005). The Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, p. 54.
  3. ↑ WorldCat Identities: Hofheinz, Roy 1935-

References


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