Ranis and Hathaway to research international topics as Carnegie Scholars

Two Yale faculty members, Gustav Ranis and Oona Hathaway, are among the 15 new Carnegie Scholars recently appointed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Carnegie Scholars each receive up to $100,000 for a period of up to two years to pursue research in the four areas of strategic importance to the corporation: education, international development, strengthening U.S. democracy and international peace and security. The 15 new scholars join 52 others awarded fellowships since Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, inaugurated the program in 1999.

Ranis '56 Ph.D. is the Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics and has been the Henry R. Luce Director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies since 1996. He is a leading expert on theoretical and policy-related issues of economic development and has served as a consultant to several international organizations and developing countries. He has been chief economist of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the director of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics. He has also served as director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale. He has worked extensively in Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines and Taiwan and is considered a leading authority on the economies of those countries. Ranis has written more than 200 articles, as well as authored or co-authored several major books, among them: "Development of the Labor Surplus Economy"; "En Route to Modern Economic Growth: Latin America in the 1990s"; "Growth and Development from an Evolutionary Perspective"; and "Japan and the U.S. in the Developing World."

"My work under the Carnegie Scholar grant will focus on the two-way relationship between economic growth and improvements in the underlying human condition," Ranis explains. "I am especially interested in understanding why many countries manage to move from a relatively good human development and poor growth situation to a virtuous cycle, while the reverse never holds. I would also like to determine whether there is a minimum threshold for human development that permits sustained growth to occur."

Hathaway, who teaches at the Law School, is an expert on human rights and international law and has written extensively on those subjects. Writing both at the scholarly and journalistic level, she has also covered such diverse topics as international law governing torture, trade liberalization and industry's demand for trade protection, the global debate about biodiversity and the status of women in Kuwait. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, Hathaway earned her law degree from Yale Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and where she served in an editorial capacity for the Yale Journal of International Law and the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. Following law school, Hathaway clerked for Judge Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Between serving her clerkships and joining the faculty at Yale, she was a fellow at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Center for Ethics and the Professions and a professor at Boston University School of Law.

"Between Power and Principle: A Political Theory of International Law" is the title of the study she will be conducting as a Carnegie Scholar. Her research will examine how "international law shapes what countries do." Hathaway will collect extensive data in three areas of international law — human rights, the environment and trade — to test her theory that states' decisions to commit to and abide by international laws are deeply influenced by their domestic institutions and their concerns about their standing in the international community.

Describing the current debate about the effectiveness of international law as "highly polarized and highly unproductive," Hathaway argues her study stands to offer a more constructive middle ground. In her proposal for the Carnegie award, she wrote, "By discarding an all-or-nothing approach in favor of a more nuanced understanding of when and how international law can shape what states do, we can find ways to use international law more effectively to bring order to a world that desperately needs it."