Dwight H. Perkins (economist)

Dwight Heald Perkins (born in Chicago, Illinois in 1934) is an American academic, economist, sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He is the son of Lawrence Bradford Perkins, architect, and Margery Blair Perkins and the grandson of Dwight Heald Perkins, the architect, for whom he was named. He married Julie Rate Perkins in 1957 and they have three adult children.

Perkins earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University in 1956. After two years military service in the US Navy, Perkins resumed his studies at Harvard. He earned a MA in economics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1964. His doctoral thesis was "Price Formation in Communist China".

Perkins' teaching career at Harvard began when he was still a graduate student, and continued uninterrupted through 2006 when he became a research and emeritus professor. He was a member of both the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and of the Harvard Kennedy School. He was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1992-1993. He has published 25 books and over 150 articles dealing both with general issues of economic development but mainly focused on the economic history and development of China, Korea, and the economies of Southeast Asia ("cv").

Perkins began his studies of China and the Chinese language as an undergraduate in 1954, but made his first visit to the People's Republic of China in 1974 as a consultant to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the United States Senate accompanying Senator Henry M. Jackson of the state of Washington. He accompanied the Senator on two subsequent trips to China in 1978 and 1979 during which the Senator and his advisors had talks with Deng Xiaoping and other senior officials of the Chinese government.("Report of Senator Henry M. Jackson to the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1979) He led a delegation of the Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People's Republic of China (CSCPRC) to study rural small-scale industry in 1975 and in 1979 he was a member of the first CSCPRC economics delegation to China led by Lawrence Klein. In over 80 trips to the People's Republic of China since then he has lectured at various universities and was made an honorary professor/researcher of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the Central China University of Science and Technology that also awarded him the Chang Peigang Award in 2010 for contributions to development economics (www.everychina.news.com). He was the first Cornelius Vander Starr Distinguished Fellow of the China Development Research Foundation in 2008 and 2009 and worked with the Foundation and the Development Research Center of the State Council in various capacities including many of the Development Forums that they ran.(cv)

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