Jomo Kwame Sundaram known as Jomo, is a prominent Malaysian economist

Economist

An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

, who has served as the United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

 Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) since 2005. He was founder chair of International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs), and sat on the Board of the United Nations Research Institute For Social Development

United Nations Research Institute For Social Development

The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development is "an autonomous United Nations agency that carries out research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems affecting development"...

 (UNRISD), Geneva

Geneva

Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

. In 2007, he was awarded the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. During 2008-2009, he served as adviser to Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the 63rd United Nations General Assembly, and as a member of the [Stiglitz] Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.

Jomo is a leading scholar and expert on the political economy of development, especially in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...

, who has authored or edited over a hundred books and translated 12 volumes besides writing many academic papers and articles for the media. He is on the editorial boards of several learned journals.

Born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1952, Jomo studied at the Penang Free School (PFS, 1964-1966), Royal Military College (RMC, 1967-1970), Yale (1970-1973) and Harvard (1973-1977). He has taught at Science University of Malaysia (USM, 1974), Harvard (1974-1975), Yale (1977), National University of Malaysia (UKM, 1977-1982), University of Malaya (1982-2004) and Cornell (1993). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University (1987-1988; 1991-1992) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2004).

Before joining the UN, Jomo was already widely recognized as an outspoken intellectual

Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...

, with unorthodox non-partisan views. Before the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, Jomo was an early advocate of appropriate new capital

Capital

A capital city is the area of a country, province, region, or state considered to enjoy primary status; although there are exceptions, a capital is typically a city that physically encompasses the offices and meeting places of the seat of government and is usually fixed by law or by the constitution...

 account management measures, which then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad later introduced. When then Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim

Anwar Ibrahim

Anwar bin Ibrahim is a Malaysian politician who served as Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister from 1993 to 1998. Early in his career, Anwar was a close ally of Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad but subsequently emerged as the most prominent critic of Mahathir's government.In 1999, he was sentenced...

 was imprisoned without trial under the Internal Security Act

Internal Security Act (Malaysia)

The Internal Security Act 1960 is a preventive detention law in force in Malaysia. The legislation was enacted after Malaysia gained independence from Britain in 1957. The ISA allows for detention without trial or criminal charges under limited, legally defined circumstances...

, Jomo publicly condemned the repression

Repression

Repression may refer to:* Memory inhibition, the ability to filter irrelevant memories from attempts to recall* Political repression, the oppression or persecution of an individual or group for political reasons* Social repression...

. In late 1998, he was sued for defamation for 250 million ringgit by Vincent Tan

Vincent Tan

Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan Chee Yioun Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan Chee Yioun Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan Chee Yioun (born 1952; ; is the current owner of Cardiff City F.C. and also is the Chairman and Chief Executive of Berjaya Corporation Berhad, which controls a wide array of businesses...

, a Mahathir era billionaire, who later dropped the case after almost a decade.

Biography

Named after two African anti-imperialist leaders, Jomo was born in Penang

Penang

Penang is a state in Malaysia and the name of its constituent island, located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia by the Strait of Malacca. It is bordered by Kedah in the north and east, and Perak in the south. Penang is the second smallest Malaysian state in area after Perlis, and the...

, Malaysia, soon after the first Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta

Jomo Kenyatta

Jomo Kenyattapron.] served as the first Prime Minister and President of Kenya. He is considered the founding father of the Kenyan nation....

 was incarcerated by the British in late 1952 and years after the first Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah served as Secretary of the Pan-African Congress. He spent his early years studying at Westlands Primary School (1959–63), the Penang Free School

Penang Free School

Penang Free School is a secondary school located on Jalan Masjid Negeri , George Town, Penang, Malaysia. Although the medium of instruction is now Malay, Penang Free School was the first English-medium school in South East Asia. It is widely recognised as one of Penang's premier schools and alumni...

 (1964–66) and the Royal Military College

Royal Military College

The Royal Military College can refer to:* Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, Canada* Royal Military College Saint-Jean in Saint-Jean, Quebec, Canada* Royal Military College, Duntroon in Campbell, Australian Capital Territory, Australia...

 (1967–70), when he was selected as Malaysia’s delegate to the World Youth Forum in 1970.

Jomo later attended Yale College

Yale College

Yale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. The name now refers to the undergraduate part of the university. Each undergraduate student is assigned to one of 12 residential colleges.-Residential colleges:...

 (1970–73) on a full scholarship. After graduating cum laude from Yale, maoring in economics, Jomo went on to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to obtain his MPA in 1974. After losing his father in early 1974, he returned to teach in Malaysia at Universiti Sains Malaysia

Universiti Sains Malaysia

Universiti Sains Malaysia is a public university with its main campus in Penang, Malaysia. There are three branch campuses: one in mainland Penang , one in Kelantan on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, and a offshore collaboration with a university in India...

 in mid-1974, before working for a doctorate at Harvard, which he completed in late 1977 while teaching at Yale, after earlier teaching stints at Harvard during 1974 and 1975 in the Economics Department, the Social Studies program and the Kennedy Institute of Politics.

He returned to Malaysia to research his doctoral thesis

Thesis

A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...

 in 1976 before joining the economics faculty of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

The National University of Malaysia is a public university located in Bangi, Selangor which is about 35 km south of Kuala Lumpur...

 in early 1977. In mid-1982, Jomo moved to the University of Malaya

University of Malaya

The University of Malaya is located on a campus near the centre of Kuala Lumpur, and is the oldest university in Malaysia. It was founded in 1905 as a public-funded tertiary institution...

, where he remained until 2004. He was a British Academy Visiting Professor and later Visiting Fellow at Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

 (1987–88, 1991–92), Fulbright Visiting Professor at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 (1993) and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

National University of Singapore

The National University of Singapore is Singapore's oldest university. It is the largest university in the country in terms of student enrollment and curriculum offered....

 (2004).

Jomo was also Founder Director of the independent Institute of Social Analysis (INSAN) (1978-2004), editor of the monthly bilingual magazine, Nadi Insan (Human Pulse) (1979-1983), President of the Malaysian Social Science Association (1996-2000) and Convenor of the first and second International Malaysian Studies Conventions (1997, 1999). He was Founder Chair (2001-2004) of International Development Economics Associates and has also served on the Board of the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development, Geneva.

Jomo was a member of the National Economic Consultative Council during 1989-1991 when he worked on post-New Economic Policy or post-1990 policy reform proposals. Since the 1970s, he has worked with government ministries, business organizations, trade unions as well as civil society organizations. Since the 1980s, he has also worked with many international organizations.

Since January 2005, Jomo has been Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development in the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and (Honorary) Research Coordinator for the G24 Intergovernmental Group on International Monetary Affairs and Development since December 2006. He also led the response to the 2005 Summit call to help Member States develop national development strategies to achieve the internationally agreed development goals while promoting their greater coherence as the United Nations Development Agenda. Jomo has tried to ensure greater UN system-wide collaboration in report preparation including the annual World Economic and Social Survey and biennial Report on the World Social Situation.

Together with the Bank of International Settlements, the UN and the G24 – under his leadership – have been acknowledged as the only international organizations who warned of the impending 2007-2009 crisis. In response to the crisis, he initiated the UN system-wide supplementary Macroeconomic Advisory Capacity to offer ‘second opinions’ on appropriate policy responses emphasizing economic recovery and employment generation, served as a member of the [Stiglitz] Commission of Experts of the President of the UN General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System during 2008-2009, and led a parallel effort for the G24 to articulate international financial system reform proposals.

Since 2010, he has been G20 ‘sherpa’ for the UN Secretary General besides serving as G20 ‘Finance Deputy’ for the UN since 2011. In these different capacities, he has worked to build an international consensus to ensure UN system-wide coherence, complementary economic and social policies for balanced and sustainable development, appropriate investment incentives, employment generation and, more recently, a strong and sustained economic recovery.

Jomo has addressed ministerial meetings of UNCTAD, most UN regional commissions, Funds and Programmes, several UN agencies as well as ECOSOC and the General Assembly’s Second, Third and Fifth Committees as well as the World Economic Forum (Davos), Global Policy Forum (Yaroslavl), World Public Forum (Rhodos), World Social Forum (Porto Alegre) and many academic, business and civil society conferences.

His extensive writings have covered development economics

Development economics

Development Economics is a branch of economics which deals with economic aspects of the development process in low-income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example,...

, international economics

International economics

International economics is concerned with the effects upon economic activity of international differences in productive resources and consumer preferences and the institutions that affect them...

, industrial policy

Industrial policy

The Industrial Policy plan of a nation, sometimes shortened IP, "denotes a nation's declared, official, total strategic effort to influence sectoral development and, thus, national industry portfolio." These interventionist measures comprise "policies that stimulate specific activities and promote...

, privatization

Privatization

Privatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency or public service from the public sector to the private sector or to private non-profit organizations...

, rent-seeking corruption, economic liberalization

Economic liberalization

Economic liberalization is a very broad term that usually refers to fewer government regulations and restrictions in the economy in exchange for greater participation of private entities; the doctrine is associated with classical liberalism...

, economic distribution, affirmative action

Affirmative action

Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...

, ethnic relations, Islam

Islam

Islam . The most common are and .   : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

and Malaysian history. Jomo has authored or edited over a hundred books and translated a dozen volumes besides writing many academic papers and articles for the media. Some of his better known books include A Question of Class, Privatizing Malaysia, Southeast Asia’s Misunderstood Miracle, Tigers in Trouble, Malaysia’s Political Economy, Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development, Malaysian Eclipse, The New Development Economics, Flat World, Big Gaps, Reforming the International Financial System for Development, Poor Poverty and Good Governance for What? In 2007, he was awarded the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

Personal information

Jomo is married to Noelle Rodriguez; they have three children, Nadia (born 1987), Emil (born 1989) and Leal (born 1990). His mother lived with them on Roosevelt Island in New York City until she passed away in December 2010 at the age of 91.

Monographs

• Development and Population: Critique of Existing Theories. (1982)
• Early Labour: Children at Work on Malaysian Plantations. (with Josie Zaini, P. Ramasamy and Sumathy Suppiah) (1984)
• A Question of Class: Capital, the State and Uneven Development in Malaya. (1988)
• Development Policies and Income Inequality in Peninsular Malaysia. (with Ishak Shari) (1986)
• Mahathir’s Economic Policies. (with others) (1989)
• Beyond 1990: Considerations for a New National Development Strategy. (1989)
• Beyond the New Economic Policy? Malaysia in the Nineties. (1990)
• Growth and Structural Change in the Malaysian Economy. (1990)
• The Way Forward? The Political Economy of Development Policy Reform in Malaysia. (1993)
• Trade Unions and the State in Peninsular Malaysia. (with Patricia Todd) (1994)
• U-Turn? Malaysian Economic Development Policies After 1990. (1994)
• Southeast Asia’s Misunderstood Miracle: Industrial Policy and Economic Development in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. (with others) (1997)
• Malaysia’s Political Economy: Politics, Patronage and Profits. (with E.T. Gomez) (1999)
• Economic Considerations for a Renewed Nationalism. (1998)
• Economic Diversification and Primary Commodity Processing in the Second-tier Southeast Asian Newly Industrializing Countries. (with Michael Rock) (1998)
• Growth After The Asian Crisis: What Remains Of The East Asian Model? (2001)
• Globalization, Liberalization and Equitable Development: Lessons from East Asia. (2003)
• Deforesting Malaysia: The Political Economy and Social Ecology of Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Logging. (with Chang Y. T. , Khoo K. J. and others) (2004)
• M Way: Mahathir’s Economic Legacy. (2004)
• Malaysian "Bail-Outs"? Capital Controls, Restructuring & Recovery in Malaysia. (with Wong Sook Ching and Chin Kok Fay) (2005)
• Law, Institutions and Malaysian Economic Development. (with Wong Sau Ngan) (2008)
• Labour Market Segmentation in Malaysian Services. (with H. L. Khong) (2010)

Edited volumes

• Development in the Eighties. (with H. Osman Rani and Ishak Shari) (1981)
• The Malaysian Economy and Finance. (with Sritua Arief) (1983)
• ASEAN Economies: Crisis and Response. (1985)
• Crisis and Response in the Malaysian Economy. (1987)
• Child Labour in Malaysia. (1992)
• Islamic Economic Alternatives: Critical Perspectives and New Directions. (1992)
• Industrialising Malaysia: Performance, Problems, Prospects. (1993)
• Privatizing Malaysia: Rents, Rhetoric, Realities. (1995)
• Malaysia’s Economic Development: Policy & Reform. (with Ng Suew Kiat) (1996)
• Capital, the State and Late Industrialization in East Asia. (with John Borrego and Alejandro Alvarez Bejar) (1996)
• Tigers in Trouble: Financial Governance, Liberalisation and Crises in East Asia. (1998)
• Industrial Policy in East Asia. (with Tan Kock Wah) (1999)
• Technology, Competitiveness and the State: Malaysia’s Industrial Technology Policies. (with Greg Felker) (1999)
• Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and the Asian Evidence. (with Mushtaq Khan) (2000)
• Malaysian Eclipse: Economic Crisis and Recovery. (2001)
• Reinventing Malaysia: Reflections on Its Past and Future. (2001)
• Globalization Versus Development: Heterodox Perspectives. (with Shyamala Nagaraj) (2001)
• Southeast Asia’s Industrialization: Industrial Policy, Capabilities and Sustainability. (2001)
• Ugly Malaysians? South-South Investments Abused. (2002)
• Southeast Asia’s Paper Tigers: From Miracle To Debacle And Beyond. (2003)
• Manufacturing Miracles: How Internationally Competitive National Firms And Industries Developed In East Asia. (2003)
• Globalisation And Its Discontents, Revisited. (with K. J. Khoo) (2003)
• Ethnic Business? Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia. (with Brian Folk) (2003)
• After The Storm: Crisis, Recovery and Sustaining Development in East Asia. (2004)
• The New Development Economics. (with Ben Fine) (2005)
• The Origins of Development Economics. (with Erik Reinert) (2005)
• Pioneers of Development Economics. (2005)
• The Long Twentieth Century -- Globalization Under Hegemony: The Changing World Economy. (2006)
• The Long Twentieth Century -- The Great Divergence: Hegemony, Uneven Development and Global Inequality. (2006)
• Malaysian Industrial Policy. (2007)
• Policy Matters: Economic And Social Policies To Sustain Equitable Development. (with Jose Antonio Ocampo) (2007)
• Flat World, Big Gaps: Economic Liberalization, Globalization, Poverty and Inequality. (2007)
• Growth Divergences: Explaining differences in economic performance. (with Jose Antonio Ocampo and Robert Vos) (2007)
• Towards full and decent employment. (with Jose Antonio Ocampo) (2007)
• Reforming the International Financial System for Development. (2011)
• Poor Poverty. (with Anis Chowdhury) (2011)
• Good Governance For What?. (with Anis Chowdhury) (2012)

External links

• KS Jomo's website