Sir William Arthur Lewis

Who is Sir William Arthur Lewis?

Sir William Arthur Lewis was a Saint Lucian economist whose pioneering work on economic development in poor countries made him one of the most influential development economists of the twentieth century. Born in Castries in 1915, he studied at the London School of Economics and in 1938 became the first Black person to hold a full academic position on its faculty. He later taught at the University of Manchester, where he developed his celebrated 'dual sector model' of economic growth, explaining how developing economies absorb surplus agricultural labor into industry, published in his influential 1954 paper 'Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour' and expanded in The Theory of Economic Growth (1955). He served as the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and advised newly independent Caribbean and African governments. In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Theodore Schultz, becoming the first person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in a field other than Peace. He was knighted in 1963 and taught for many years at Princeton University until his death in 1991.

Sources: Nobel Prize official biography, "W. Arthur Lewis – Facts," NobelPrize.org (1979) · W. Arthur Lewis, "Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour," The Manchester School (1954) · W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (Allen & Unwin, 1955)