Kuznets Visitors

A program to foster cross-university collaboration

Under the aegis of the Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture program, the Economic Growth Center hosts short-term visiting economists for periods of 1-2 weeks starting in Fall 2022. Visitors contribute to the Yale development economics community during their stay by meeting with coauthors and student groups, delivering seminars, and collaborating with centers and groups across the University. EGC encourages nominations of under-represented groups in the economics profession and nomination of scholars based in universities in low- and lower-middle income countries. Those interested in visiting EGC under the Kuznets Visitors program can send a letter of interest to egc@yale.edu.

The larger program honors Simon Kuznets. Born in 1901 in what is today Belarus, Kuznets had helped launch the US national income statistics series in 1934. The motivation was to use data for policy – the statistics series was issued to meet the need to describe consistently and in detail the economic toll taken by the Great Depression. Post World War II, Kuznets saw a need for a center to do what his home institutions weren’t able to do – to use data to understand development. He believed Yale was the ideal home for such a venture and he worked with the chair of Yale’s economics department and Ford Foundation to set up EGC in 1961. Kuznets went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1971 for theoretical and empirical contributions to the measurement of economic growth, and remained a senior consultant for EGC until his death in 1985.