Lewis, Sir Arthur (1915-1991), a British economist, became the first black person to win the Nobel Prize in economics. He and Theodore W. Schultz of the United States shared the award in 1979 for their research on the economic problems of developing nations.
Lewis helped shape the field of development economics with his book Theory of Economic Growth (1955). Lewis’s economic theories emphasize the relationship between traditional agriculture and modern industries in developing nations and between developing countries and developed countries.
William Arthur Lewis was born on Jan. 23, 1915, in St. Lucia in the Caribbean. He began teaching at the London School of Economics in 1938 and earned a Ph.D. degree there in 1940. From 1963 to 1985, he taught at Princeton University. Lewis held advisory and other official posts in the United Kingdom and Ghana, and at the United Nations and the World Bank. In 1970, he became the first president of the Caribbean Development Bank. Lewis was knighted in 1963. He died on June 15, 1991.
