Bina Agarwal

Bina Agarwal
Bina Agarwal at the World Economic Forum on India 2012
Nationality	Indian
Field	Gender Equality, bargaining approach, cooperative conflict
Alma mater	University of Cambridge University of Delhi
Awards	Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 1996, Edgar Graham Book Prize 1996, The K. H. Batheja Award 1995–96, Leontief Prize 2010

Bina Agarwal is a prize-winning development economist and Director and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in University of Delhi. She has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation. Among her best known works is the award-winning book—A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia—which has had a significant impact on governments, NGOs, and international agencies in promoting women's rights in land and property. This work has also inspired research in Latin America and globally.

Bina Agarwal earned her doctorate in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, her dissertation was Mechanization in Indian Agriculture: An Econometric Analysis. Prior, she earned a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Cambridge. Her university positions include posts at Princeton, Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York University. At Harvard she was the first Daniel Ingalls Visiting Professor Agarwal has also been President of the International Society for Ecological Economics. Vice-President of the International Economic Association, President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, on the Board of the Global Development Network, and one of the twenty-one members of the Commission for the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. She has served on the UN Committee for Development Policy (New York) and UNRISD (Geneva). She holds honorary doctorates from the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

Agarwal's expertise is on subjects related to rural economy. She has creatively used diverse methodologies (from econometric analysis to qualitative assessments) and an interdisciplinary approach, to provide insights on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; law; and agriculture and technological change. She deals especially with the connectedness of gender inequality, social exclusion, property, and development. Her pioneering work has had an impact globally both within the academia and among policy makers and practitioners. A large part of her work compares countries, especially within South Asia. In A Field of One's Own (Cambridge University Press, 1994), her most famous work, Agarwal stresses that "the single most important factor affecting women's situation is the gender gap in command over property." She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy.