Professor Michael Lipton

Professor Michael Lipton has been awarded a high-profile international award for his research into the economics of food and agriculture.

Professor Lipton, a leading economist, jointly received the 2012 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought at a ceremony in Massachusetts, USA on Tuesday (3 April). He shared the honour with C. Peter Timmer of Harvard University.

The award - set up in 2000 by Tufts University's Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) in memory of Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief - has become one of the most prestigious in the field, with previous winners including Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.

GDAE Co-Director, Neva Goodwin, said: "The current food crisis is an early indication of one of the greatest economic, humanitarian, and environmental challenges of our time.

"Michael Lipton and C. Peter Timmer have been giants in the field of food and agricultural policy. Their research and writings have provided critical conceptual leadership as well as the empirical foundations necessary to address the challenges we face."

Professor Lipton was the founding director in 1995 of the Poverty Research Unit at Sussex, which conducts research into all aspects of poverty, and he remains active in the research of the Department of Economics.

He has worked at Sussex since the early 1960s, specialising in agricultural research, nutrition economics, poverty, and economic demography in developing countries, including Bangladesh, Botswana, India, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

His latest book, Land Reform in Developing Countries, was published in 2009.

For more information about the Leontief Prize, go to the Tufts University website.