President Aragonès announced it today highlighting Stiglitz's “transformative economic pragmatism”
The President of the Government of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, announced this afternoon that the American economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has been awarded the XXXV International Catalonia Prize. The head of the Executive highlighted the award winner's “transforming economic pragmatism,” saying that Stiglitz “teaches us how to build a fairer, more prosperous, greener, more feminist, and thus freer world from the economy.”
“A global economist of reference and for all of us who believe that economic policy should be oriented towards human dignity and collective well-being in the construction of a fairer and freer world.” Aragonès also stated that Joseph E. Stiglitz believes that “inequalities are not inevitable but are a choice” and that “the economy advances better if there is equality of opportunity, which means more equality of income and wealth distribution.” “And how economic inequalities end up causing political inequalities, with the deterioration of democracy that this entails,” he added.
The prize was awarded to Joseph E. Stiglitz for “articulating a vision of the economy, in all its aspects, that has made him a world reference for a more ethical economy, focused on the global South, on the fight against inequality, and on sustainability,” according to Mary Ann Newman, delegate president of the Prize jury, who spoke at the ceremony via video.
The jury also stated that Stiglitz “has always excelled from the beginning of his career, both academic and professional, reaching the pinnacle of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001,” and that “he has continued to develop, with the intellectual strength and rigour that characterize him, a whole second stage as articulator of a vision of the global economy more committed to the fight against inequality, with sustainability, and with the Global South.”
Additionally, the award's jury stated that “he has recently taken a position in favour of economic policies that combat tax evasion by large multinationals and encourage the creation of a global register of assets to detect individual hidden wealth, both of which actions would allow rebalancing global inequality.” The jury concludes, “A brilliant economist, independent of any economist or business servitude, and of exemplary integrity.”
The XXXV International Catalonia Prize award ceremony will take place on June 22 at the Palau de la Generalitat in a ceremony presided over by President Aragonès. The Prize, endowed with 80,000 euros and Antoni Tàpies' sculpture “The key and the letter,” is given annually to those who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of cultural, scientific, or human values. Nominations can be submitted by institutions from all over the world as well as members of the jury, according to the rules that are published each year with the announcement of the award. Last year's laureates include Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Aleksievich (2022); philosopher Judith Butler (2021 edition); doctors Dania El Mazloum and Anxhela Gradeci, nurse Tijana Postic, and doctor and researcher zlem Türeci (2020).
Biographical note
Joseph Stiglitz was born in the United States in 1943 in Gary, Indiana. Amherst College graduate, he received his PhD in economics from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1967, and after a few years at Cambridge University, he became a full professor at Yale in 1970. He has also taught at Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, and MIT. Stiglitz has been a professor at Columbia University in New York since 2001, where he founded and co-chairs the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. He is also co-chair of the OECD's High-Level Panel on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress and the Roosevelt Institute's chief economist.