PRESENT: COMBATING POVERTY

Prof. Sir Anthony B. Atkinson, Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Honorary Fellow Nuffield College, Oxford.

Prof. Atkinson was one of the world’s leading scholars on poverty and inequality and was particularly concerned with issues of social justice and the design of public policy. His work focuses on Britain and other rich countries and he was deeply involved in policy discussions in Britain and in Europe.

Atkinson virtually single-handedly established the modern British field of inequality and poverty studies. He worked on inequality and poverty for over six decades and Chaired the Commission on Global Poverty established by the World Bank. He was President of the LIS Cross-National Database, and was one of the founders of the World Top Incomes Database.  His work is unfailingly meticulous about measurement, and provides credible data on these deeply controversial and politicized topics.

Amongst his prestigious awards and memberships are the A.SK Social Science Award by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB Social Science Center in Berlin) 2007, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (2001), he was knighted in 2000, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), Honorary Member of the American Economic Association (1985), Fellow of the British Academy (1984), and Fellow of the Econometric Society (1974).