Indian born Sanjaya Lall's academic destination was defined early in his life when he won a gold medal in 1960 for being the top ranked student at his local school in Patna. He went on to win the St. John's College Prize at Oxford University in 1963 for a first class honours degree. Based at the sub-faculty of economics for over 30 years, he rose to the position of Professor of Development Economics. A prolific researcher, he published 33 books and hundreds of internationally acclaimed articles. Sanjaya Lall was also a Fellow of Green College, Oxford, editor of Oxford Development Studies and a member of World Development's advisory board from its inception .

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In Sanjaya Lall Oxford University had a truly world class scholar who intensely championed the logic underlying the fact that some economies enjoyed higher learning and innovation capabilities than others. In his view, technological capability building was the driver of exports and growth, and hence the path developing economies must take to achieve development. Driven by an epistemological conviction that theory must be defined by evidence, he fought an often lonely crusade against the ideologues who uncritically peddled neo-liberalism, on the one hand, and populism on the other. Unimpressed with mainstream economic theory Sanjaya increasingly went to the field to seek empirical ammunition for constructing an alternative theoretical vision to understand the complex problems of development. He was less scathing of partisan populists only because of the limited influence they had on development policy.

Although Sanjaya Lall belonged to a rare breed of exceptional scholars, his humility, gentleness and keenness to lead the young had few peers. Like a master supremely confident of his abilities and heavily committed to his curious disciples, Sanjaya spent considerable time engaging with promising scholars to realize their creative self. His brilliance gave him the wit, his artistry gave him the reach, his honesty drove him towards the truth, his selfless character gave him the conviction, his confidence gave him the generosity and his commitment gave him the industry.

Sanjaya Lall had originally made a name in the field of multinationals and developing economies. However, his awareness of a range of factors that interact to influence this process motivated his work on trade and competitiveness, globalization and its economic consequences, industrial policy and industrialization, and innovation and technological capabilities. Although all the above have been at the heart of the research many of us have done and continue to do, I believe it is in the last area that UNU-INTECH benefited most from his scholarship. Sanjaya Lall pioneered novel methodologies to classify and demonstrate the importance of technological capabilities – through arms-length transactions, and active learning and innovation – for poor economies to move up the development ladder. The pursuit of novelty brought him popularity among his admirers, and grudging respect from his critics. His commitment to seek alternatives led him to participate directly in the formulation of policies, which made him lead globally influential policy teams (e.g. for UNIDO, UNCTAD and the World Bank) as well as numerous national policy blueprints.

The world has lost one of its most potent appropriators of knowledge. Fortunately for us, although he is no longer with us Sanjaya Lall's inspiring works and the hundreds of prodigies he mentored unselfishly will now carry the torch of development economics for many decades to come.

Rajah Rasiah, Professor of Technology and Innovation Policy, University of Malaya and Senior Research Fellow, UNU-INTECH

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It is a sad time for those of us who lived the paradigm shift from one in which all technology was thought to flow from north to south - and debates centred on how appropriate such technology transfer was - to a view of technology as embedded in a social context and indigenous technological capability building as a critical part of the development process. Two of the leaders in this movement were Linsu Kim, a member of the Board and Sanjaya Lall, a long time associate of UNU-INTECH. Just last year after Linsu's sudden death, Sanjaya Lall encouraged me to prepare a special issue of Oxford Development Studies in his memory.  A few weeks ago, Sanjaya and I were having a rushed breakfast in Geneva where he came regularly over the years to advise UNCTAD's World Investment Report. The focus this year is on the issue of R&D Globalization and Development. It brings together many of Sanjaya's interests on firm-level capabilities, government policies, transnational corporations, globalization and the measurement of these processes and their contribution to development. The breadth of his expertise and the rootedness of his intellectual strengths in long term research in Africa and Asia will be sorely missed. So, too, will his soft manner and keen interest in helping others. It is hard to believe that he has gone.

Professor Lynn K. Mytelka, Former Director, UNU-INTECH, and
Former Director, UNCTAD, Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development

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One of Sanjaya Lall's foremost contributions was in demonstrating that the behaviour of firms was central to the extraordinary growth of China, Korea and other East Asian economies over several decades. In essence, East Asian firms systematically invested in creating competence to use technologies from abroad and this paid off in spectacular export successes from clothing to semi-conductors. Furthermore, he argued that learning in enterprises was facilitated by supportive “liberalization plus” economic policies. This meant that East Asian governments combined trade openness with investments in education, efficient technology institutions, aggressively attracting multinationals and, in some cases, incentives for particular industries. In highlighting the role of the state in creating comparative advantage in East Asia, he felt that early economic analysis of the East Asian miracle had mis-read in the evidence a minimalist state. Deeply aware of the risks of “government failure” arising from weak states, Sanjaya also worked on how East Asian governments created the capacity to managed liberalization.

In an era where competitiveness studies have become increasingly popularized by the World Economic Forum and Harvard Business School's Michael Porter, one of Sanjaya's contribution's was the application of the microeconomics of technical change and market failures to competitiveness analysis. He felt that the cluster approach advanced by Porter lacked rigorous economic foundations and that the World Economic Forum's competitiveness index was flawed due to its mixing of soft data on businessmen's perceptions with hard published economic data.

Sanjaya was particularly influential as an economic policy adviser to governments and international organizations. His forte was adapting complex policy lessons garnered in East Asia to some forty economies in Africa , South Asia , the Caribbean , Latin America and Eastern Europe . The measure of his influence is the fact that the day before he passed away, the Prime Minister of Russia phoned him at home to seek some clarification of the advice he had given on his last visit. Furthermore, he received an honorary doctorate from Beijing University on a visit to China last year. For nearly a decade, he was the principal author of UNCTAD's annual World Investment Report and pioneered the revamping of UNIDO's Industrial Development Report .

For all this international attention, Sanjaya was a modest and unassuming intellectual. He was a brilliant lecturer who could distil complicated economic concepts into their simplest elements. However busy he was, he always had time for discussions with his students and was legendary in Oxford for his hospitality.

Dr. Ganeshan Wignaraja, Asian Development Bank and UNU-INTECH Research Fellow