Speakers

Feature Speaker - Professor Polanyi Levitt

Professor Kari Polanyi Levitt was born in Vienna in 1923, and grew up in England from 1934 to 1947, when she migrated to Canada. She attended Bedales School (1936-42) and the London School of Economics, graduating with a BsC (econ) in 1947, with First Class Honour. In 1957 Kari returned to graduate studies in economics at the University of Toronto and obtained her MA in 1959. With an incomplete PhD thesis she accepted an appointment in the Department of Economics of McGill University, Montreal, in 1961. As a junior member of the Department, she was required to teach a variety of courses but her academic interest was in development economics and techniques of economic planning. From 1965 until the final completion of the work in 1975, she directed a major project of construction of input-output tables for the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, at Statistics Canada.

Professor Levitt was in constant contact with Caribbean colleagues since 1961 and from 1966-68 directed a project on externally propelled growth and industrialization in the Caribbean at the Center for Developing Areas Studies at McGill. This joint work with Lloyd Best remained unpublished for many years until Kari was able to resume preparation of the manuscript during her stays in Trinidad from 2002, jointly with Lloyd Best until his death in 2007. The work was published as “Essays in Plantation Economy” in 2009. In the early 1970s, Kari took several years of part-time leave from McGill to work for the government of Trinidad and Tobago on a system of national economic accounts as a database for the country’s next economic plan and accepted appointments at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Jamaica as visiting professor.

In the last years of teaching at McGill, now with the rank of full professor, Kari was able to specialize exclusively in the area of the economics of development with special reference to Latin American and Caribbean economic history and development. She retired from McGill in 1992 as Emerita Professor but continued to teach at the Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica until 1995 and as George Beckford professor in the Department of Economics until 1997. Her collection of the work of George Beckford was published in 2000, and her work on Caribbean political economy was published as “Reclaiming Development: independent thought and Caribbean Community” in 2005. In 2008, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies. Her latest book, “From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: on Karl Polanyi and other essays” was published in 2013.