He attended Cambridge University where he graduated in 1956 with a first in economics tripos. He then studied at MIT and Oxford, returning to India in 1961 as Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and then as Professor of International Trade at the Delhi School of Economics. Bhagwati returned to MIT in 1968, leaving it twelve years later as the Ford International Professor of Economics to join Columbia. Bhagwati has also served as Economic Policy Advisor to Director-General, GATT (1991-1993).

Bhagwati has published more than two hundred articles and forty volumes. Regarded as one of the foremost international trade theorists of his generation, he has also made contributions to development theory and policy, public finance, immigration, and to the new theory of political economy. Three festschrift volumes of essays in his honor have been published in the United States, the UK and the Netherlands.

Five volumes of his collected essays have been published by MIT Press to date. His early books "India: Planning for Industrialization" (with Padma Desai, 1970) and "India" (with T.N. Srinivasan, 1975) are acknowledged to have provided the intellectual case for the economic reforms now underway in India. His recent book "India in Transition: Freeing the Economy" was published in 1993 by Clarendon Press, Oxford. Among his books are "Protectionism" (1988), an international bestseller in several languages, and "The World Trading System at Risk" (1991), both reviewed extensively in the United States and abroad.

Bhagwati also writes frequently for "The New York Times," "The Wall Street Journal," "The Financial Times" and reviews for "The New Republic". His writings on public policy, "A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration, and Democracy," was published by MIT Press in 1998. He appears frequently on national television programs, including CNN and "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour."

Bhagwati is a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and was recently advisor to India's Finance Minister on India's economic reforms. He works with several NGOs in the United States and India. He is on the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch (Asia) and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Council on Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency (which has created the SA 8000 Standard for Corporate Social Accountability).

Bhagwati founded the "Journal of International Economics" in 1971, the premier journal in the field today and "Economics & Politics" in 1989. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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