Celso Furtado Award

The Third World Network of Scientific Organizations (TWNSO) established an international award to give recognition, encouragement and support to outstanding work in the filed of political economy of developing countries.

The award, which is established with funds generously made available by the government of the Federal Republic of Brazil, is named after Celso Furtado, one of the leading Latin American Structuralist Economists from Brazil. Born in 1920 in Paraíba, in the Northeast of Brazil, Celso Furtado graduated in Law in Rio de Janeiro (1944) and received a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Paris (1948). He taught at Yale, Cambridge and Paris and later became Minister of Planning in Brazil. The work developed by Furtado was an extension on creative economic planning formulated by the Yale Economist, Albert Hirschmann. Furtado gave an original and important intellectual contribution to the understanding of the determinants of the underdevelopment syndrome, approached from a historical perspective, and the different paths followed by different countries to overcome this condition. His books "Economic Formation of Brazil" (1959) and "Development and Underdevelopment" (1961) are considered 'classics' of the literature on the subject, and were translated into seven languages. Celso Furtado published more than 20 books and a great number of articles and essays on the political economy of development, the structure of world capitalism and foreign relations.

The Celso Furtado Prize is awarded to individuals whose work has made a fundamental contribution to the understanding and promotion of the socio-economic development of countries in the South. Based on an evaluation by a distinguished international panel of experts in political economy, it is awarded every two years on a special occasion.

The Third World Network of Scientific Organizations decided to award the first Celso Furtado Award to Gamani Corea.

The citation in the medallion reads:

“For his outstanding contributions to development theory and practice, for his analysis of global political economy from the perspective of the South; and for his enduring struggle for political and economic independence of developing countries” (Dated : October 2003).