Profile

(11 September 1940 - 23 June 2015)

Ajit Singh graduated from Punjab University in India and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been teaching economics at Cambridge University since 1965. He is currently Professor of Economics at the University and Senior Fellow at Queens' College Cambridge. Between 1970 and 1994 he was Director of Studies in Economics at Queens'. He also held, between 1987 and 1994, the Dr. William M. Scholl Visiting Chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame in the US. He has been a senior economic advisor to the governments of Mexico and Tanzania and a consultant to various UN developmental organisations, including the World Bank, the ILO, UNCTAD and UNIDO. He is the author of Takeovers: Their Relevance to the Stockmarket and the Theory of the Firm and co-author of Growth, Profitability and Valuation, both published by Cambridge University Press.

He has also published extensively in academic economic journals, including the Economic Journal, the Review of Economic Studies, the European Economic Review, the International Journal of Industrial Organisation, World Development, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. His essay, "How do developing country corporations finance their growth?" was awarded a Bronze medal in the Amex Awards Competition, 1994. His recent books include the co-edited volume with C. Howes Competitiveness Matters: Industry and Economic Performance in the U.S. published in 2000 by the University of Michigan Press, as well as his policy monographs (with Ann Zammit), The Global Labour Standards Controversy Critical Issues for Developing Countries published by the South Centre, and Global Economic Trends and Social Development published by UNRISD. He has been closely associated with the South Centre in Geneva and was an honorary special advisor to the Chairman of the Centre in 2003. He was also a Fellow of the Cambridge MIT Institute in 2002-3. In 2003, at the invitation of the editors of the Economic Journal, he contributed to and organised a symposium on Corporate Governance, Competition and Selection in Emerging Markets.