Becoming Involved in Economics | Polanyi on Polanyi
Channel: New Economic Thinking
Date: 26/02/2020

Kari Polanyi Levitt reflects on her education and career as an economist, in the UK, Canada, and the Caribbean. As an undergraduate at LSE, she studied with scholars such as Nicholas Kaldor and W. Arthur Lewis. Once in Canada, she was writing for labor unions and overseeing the preparation of the input-output tables of Canada’s Atlantic region for Statistics Canada. A request from the Canadian social democratic party (the NDP) brought her to study the effects of FDIs on an economy dominated by extractive industries, a topic she developed in her book published in 1970 Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada. In the 1960s, encounters with Alister McIntyre, Stephen Hymer and others brought her not only to study transnational corporations but also to study development economics, focusing on the Caribbean countries, which she first began visiting in 1960. Since then, she developed systematic collaboration with scholars at the University of the West Indies, especially Lloyd Best with whom she wrote the landmark study: Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development.

About “Polyanyi on Polanyi”:
Kari Polanyi Levitt, Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, is a legend in the economics profession, famous for her contributions to economic development and economic sovereignty. But she has also had a legendary life: the only child of the influential political economist Karl Polanyi, Kari’s research has carried her from the London Blitz to the Canadian labor movement to the government of Trinidad and Tobago.

In this series Polanyi reflects on an extraordinary life, and the extraordinary legacy of her family.