Richard Samuel ECKAUS

Background

Eckaus, Richard Samuel was born on April 30, 1926 in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. Son of Julius and Bessie (Finklestein) Eckaus.

Education

Bachelor of Science (Electrical Engineering) Iowa State University, 1944. Master of Arts Washington University, 1946: Doctor of Philosophy Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 1954.

Career

Instructor, assistant professor, associate professor Brandeis University, 1951-1962. Research associate Center International Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1954-1961, from associate professor to professor, 1962—1996, Ford international professor, 1977-1996, head department economics, 1987-1990, emeritus professor, since 1996. Visiting scholar Roxbury Community College, 1996—2002.

National advisory council for environmental and technical policy Environmental Protection Agency, 2002—2004. Joint program science and policy climate change. Member Board Economic Advisors to Governor Massachusetts, 1963—1965.

Consultant Asian Development Bank, Organization of European Cooperation and Development, Agency for International Development, World Bank, governments of Jamaica, Portugal, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Chile, China, Mexico.

Achievements

• Richard Samuel Eckaus has been listed as a noteworthy economist, educator by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Appropriate technologies for developing countries

    (Book by Eckaus, Richard S)

  • Estimating the returns to education: a disaggregated approach,

Views

There have been several main strands. One has been mainly microeconomic, suggesting the importance of considering the possibilities and implications of limited technical substitutability of resources used in production. While this hypothesis has remained a controversial one, it has also been fruitful, and has been adopted in many types of theoretical and applied development models.

An extension of this microeconomic interest was my work on the economics of education which generated calculations of ‘requirements’ for labour with different levels of formal education as well as different levels of job training. This produced what was, perhaps, one of the first suggestions of the possibility of imbalances between the numbers of graduates of schools at different levels of schooling and the demand for workers with those levels. The construction of relatively large intertemporal, multisectoral models for analysis of development options has been another area of concentration.

This started in a collaborative effort for India, and resulted in one of the first models of its type which had a linear programming structure The models were extended and elaborated in further collaborative work in a number of other countries: Chile, Egypt and Mexico. In the last case, extensive nonlinearities were embodied in the model overcoming many of the original limitations. Collaboration in the construction and application of multisector computable general equilibrium models has been an extension of the interest in policy models. The modification of the models to include substitution possibilities for energy sources of various types has been one type of extension of such models.

Other nonlinearities have also been embodied. All of this modelbuilding has involved extensive data preparation. The study of the development problems, both general and specific, has resulted in largeand smallscale modelling as well as project and sector studies, and estimation and refinement of data, nearly always with local collaboration.

Such work has been undertaken in Chile, Costa Rica, Egypt, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Portugal, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

Membership

Served with United States Naval Reserve, 1944-1946. Member American Economics Association.

Interests

• 112 Economic Development Models. 113 Economic Planning Theory. 121 Less Industrialised Countries.

Connections

Married Patricia L. Meaney. 1 child, Susan L.

Father:

Julius Eckaus

Mother:

Bessie (Finklestein) Eckaus

Spouse:

Patricia L. Meaney

child:

Susan L. Eckaus