Background
Born Arthur Lewis at Castries on the Island of St. Lucia on January 23,1915, he was the fourth of five sons of schoolteachers George Ferdinand and Ida Lewis.
Born Arthur Lewis at Castries on the Island of St. Lucia on January 23,1915, he was the fourth of five sons of schoolteachers George Ferdinand and Ida Lewis.
At the age of seven, Lewis became ill and was forced to stay home for many weeks. During this time his father, who died later that year, tutored him so he would not fall behind in his studies. His father did such a thorough job that when Lewis returned to school he was skipped from fourth to sixth grade, where he found himself physically smaller and younger than his peers. In his biography for the Nobel Museum Lewis describes how this affected his life until he was 18: "This gave me a terrible sense of physical inferiority, as well as an understanding, which has remained with me ever since, that high marks are not everything"
He credits his mother, a widow by the time he was seven, with encouraging him to succeed. By age 14 he had completed the equivalent of secondary education but was considered too yomig to apply for or take the government scholarship exam to study in Great Britain. For the next three years he worked as a civil service clerk for the St. Lucia government, an experience he credits with developing his skills in writing, typing, and organization. Then he went to the London School of Economics (LSE), where he completed a Bachelor of Commerce degree with first honors in 1937. On graduation the LSE offered him a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in industrial economics, which he completed in 1940.
He began his career as an academician and scholar at LSE, where he worked until 1948, when he was appointed full professor at the University of Manchester. At the University of Manchester he was also appointed to the Stanley Jevons Chair in Political Economy, making him, at 33, the youngest person in Britain or the British Commonwealth to hold a chair in economics. His visits to Africa and Asia during the 1950s and the large number of Asian and African undergraduate students at Manchester were pivotal influences that "set me lecturing systematically on development economics from about 1950" ("Sir Arthur Lewis"). A strong believer in learning through teaching led to his best-known work, The Theory of Economic Growth (1955), in which he provides a framework for studying economic development. His views, dubbed the "Lewis model," describe "how traditional societies make the economic transition to modern nations".
Lewis' life work in his capacity as an economist combined administration and international consulting work as well as academic scholarship. In 1957 he was tapped by the Mona campus in Jamaica (what was then called the University College of the West Indies) to serve as principal and later vice-chancellor. Over the next five years he transformed and expanded the institution's academic of-ferings and increased the student body to 2,000 from 690. Under his leadership it was recast into an independent and prestigious Caribbean institution renamed University of the West Indies (UWI). In addition to his work as vice chancellor of UWI from 1957 to 1963 he was also a United Nations (UN) economic adviser to the prime minister of Ghana and deputy managing director of the UN Special Fund. In 1963, the year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his pioneering work at UWI, he was also appointed professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Af-fairs. He worked at Princeton from 1963 to 1968 and also served as Distinguished University Professor of Economics and International Affairs from 1982 to 1983. In the late 1960s he served as director of Jamaica's Industrial Development Corporation, and from 1970 to 1974 he established the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and served as its president. His administrative and intellectual leadership of the CDB is believed to have provided for the first time a "viable and internationally recognized development institution culturally attuned, sensitive and responsive to its quest for social and economic development". He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize with Theodore Schultz who, like Lewis, was a scholar in the field of economics applied to the problems of developing countries.
Among his many publications are Economic Survey (1939), Racial Conflict and Economic Development (1985), and an edited compendium, Selected Economic Writings of W. Arthur Lewis (1983). The Institute of Social and Economic Research at UWI was named after him in 1963. Lewis died in Barbados in June 1991. He was laid to rest on the grounds of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St. Lucia.
(Book by Lewis, W. Arthur)
Lewis published The Theory of Economic Growth in 1955 in which he sought to “provide an appropriate framework for studying economic development,” driven by a combination of “curiosity and of practical need.