Arthur Lewis Net Worth

Background and career

Sir William Arthur Lewis (23 January 1915 – 15 June 1991) was a Saint Lucian economist and the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University. Lewis remains the only black person to have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

W. Arthur Lewis was a pioneering development economist, especially famous for his “dual-sector model” of economic development. In his 1954 paper “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour,” he described a poor country as having two sectors: a traditional (largely agricultural) sector with surplus labor, and a modern capitalist sector. Lewis showed how surplus labor could be transferred from the traditional sector into the capitalist sector, fueling industrial growth.