Economist and Friend: George Rosen (1920–2018)

George Rosen, economist and steadfast friend of India, passed away in Chicago on 8 January 2018, at the age of 98. He was professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The title of Rosen’s delightful autobiography published in 2005, Globalization and Some of Its Contents: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant, says it all. In what is clearly a riposte to the famous diatribe against globalisation by Joseph Stiglitz (Globalisation and Its Discontents, 2002), the book speaks of what the freedom to migrate meant to people facing religious persecution, like his own family of Jewish extraction. Migration today is a contentious issue, and the persecuted of yesterday often become the persecutors of tomorrow, but Rosen saw resistance to religious and race labels as enabled only in a globally-linked world.

He produced a stream of scholarly work on India over a span of 50 years. Of his many books, the first, titled Some Aspects of Industrial Finance in India published in 1962, was a boon for students looking for some light on how the great industrial future promised by the leadership of the time was going to be financed. The contribution made by the book is attested to by its having been cited, after a lapse of more than 50 years, in a 2015 Economic & Political Weekly article on the subject by Partha Ray (“Rise and Fall of Industrial Finance in India,”EPW, 31 January 2015).