Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist

and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in

Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice
president and chief economist of the World Bank, and is a former member, and Chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers.
[2][3]
He is known for his critical view of the management of
globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists"), and some
international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international
development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia
faculty, has been a University Professor since 2003, and is the Co-Chair of the University's
Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World
Poverty Institute as well as the Socialist International Commission on Global Financial Issues
and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz has over 40 honorary
doctorates and at least eight honorary professorships, as well as an honorary deanship.
[4][5][6]
In
2009 the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann,
appointed Stiglitz as the Chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International
Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals, and Commissioned a
report on reforming the international monetary and financial system.
[7]
Since 2012 Stiglitz has
been the President of the International Economic Association
[8]
and is currently presiding over
the organization of the IEA triennial world congress that will be held on the Dead Sea Jordan in
June 2014.
[9]

Stiglitz is the 4th most influential economist in the world today based on academic citations,
[10]

and in 2011 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the
world.
[11]
Stiglitz's work focuses on income distribution, asset risk management, corporate
governance, and international trade, and is the author of ten books, with his latest, The Price of
Inequality (2012), hitting The New York Times best seller list.
[12]