Hirofumi Uzawa

Hirofumi Uzawa (Japanese宇 沢 弘文, Hirofumi Uzawa, born July 21, 1928 in Tottori Prefecture ) is a Japanese economist and emeritus professor.

Career, teaching and research

Uzawa initially studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo before it with Marxist economic theory came after the end of World War II in touch and gave up his ambitions in terms of mathematics in favor of dealing with the economy. About a teammate in the rugby team at the University he came in the early 1950s in the research group of economists Hiroshi Furuya. This had been agreed with Stanford University regular visiting professor from the United States and by Hendrik Houthakker Uzawa received insights into the work of Kenneth Arrow and Leonid Hurwicz. After Arrow sent an article that had the beginnings of a theory to expand their operations research, he received an invitation to the United States.

From 1956 to Uzawa worked at Stanford University. At the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, he was initially a research assistant before he had become in the course of his training as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor. Influenced by its original Marxist reading and economics insights Thorstein Veblen and Milton Keynes he developed at this time a two-sector model for the description of economic growth. Later it took Lloyd Metzler as full professor at the University of Chicago. In 1969, he returned as professor back to the University of Tokyo, but was a guest lecturer around the world in the following years.

The focus of the work Uzawas lies in the field of economics. His work contributed to a formal mathematical description of economic relationships. He has published in particular on the neoclassical theory and advanced particularly the work of Robert M. Solow on the - later Nobel Prize- winning - named after him Solow model also. Later he expanded his field of research on human and social capital, where he put his focus on the provision of education and medical care.

Uzawa was one of the scientific advisers of Pope John Paul II in preparation for its encyclical Centesimus Annus, which as a reminder of the centenary of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum underscored 1991, the importance of social policy and a reorientation of Catholic social teaching in the light of current events after the collapse the totalitarian planned economy systems explained in Central and Eastern Europe.

Works

The following list is by him published in English language books again, he has also written numerous books and Japanese journal articles and working papers.

• Studies in Linear and Non- linear Programming with Ken Arrow and Leonid Hurwicz (1958 )
• Readings in the Modern Theory of Economic Growth (1968 )
• Preference, Production, and Capital: Selected Papers of Hirofumi Uzawa (1988 )
• Optimality, Equilibrium, and Growth: Selected Papers of Hirofumi Uzawa (1988 )
• Economic Theory and Global Warming (2003)
• Economic Analysis of Social Common Capital ( 2005)