16 Facts About Ragnar Nurkse

Ragnar Wilhelm Nurkse was an Estonian-American economist and policy maker mainly in the fields of international finance and economic development.

Ragnar Nurkse is considered the pioneer of Balanced Growth Theory.

Ragnar Nurkse was born in Karu village, in the then Governorate of Livonia of the former Russian Empire, son of an Estonian father who worked himself up from lumberjack to estate manager, and an Estonian-Swedish mother.

Ragnar Nurkse graduated with a first class degree in economics, under professor Frederick Ogilvie, in 1932.

Ragnar Nurkse earned a Carnegie Fellowship to study at the University of Vienna from 1932 to 1934.

Ragnar Nurkse served in the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations from 1934 to 1945, working in the Financial Section and Economic Intelligence Service.

Ragnar Nurkse was the financial analyst and was largely responsible for the annual Monetary Review.

Ragnar Nurkse was involved with the publication of The Review of World Trade, World Economic Surveys, and the report of the Delegation on Economic Depressions entitled "The Transition from War to Peace Economy".

Ragnar Nurkse was influential for his criticism of floating exchange rates, which he argued were at fault for the economic crises of the interwar period.

In 1945, Ragnar Nurkse accepted an appointment at Columbia University in New York City.

Ragnar Nurkse was a visiting lecturer at the university from 1945 to 1946, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1946 to 1947, and then returned to Columbia as an associate professor of economics in 1947.

In 1958, Ragnar Nurkse accepted a Professorship of Economics and the Director of International Finance Section position at Princeton University.

However, before he could fully resume it, when Ragnar Nurkse returned to Geneva in the spring of 1959, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 51.

Ragnar Nurkse was honored earlier in 2007 by the inauguration of a Lecture Series by the Bank of Estonia and an international conference by Tallinn University of Technology's Technology Governance program.

Ragnar Nurkse is one of the founding fathers of Classical Development Economics.

Ragnar Nurkse married Harriet Berger of Englewood, New Jersey, in 1946, and they had two sons.