Sanjaya Lall, who died of a heart attack on June 18, 2005, was a distinguished economist who made outstanding contributions to the understanding of technological capability and industrial development. In recognition of his distinction, he was appointed Professor of Development Economics at the University of Oxford in 1999.

Lall was born in Patna in 1940. His parents separated soon after his birth and he was brought up largely by his mother. He came to Oxford in 1960, read philosophy, politics and economics and took a brilliant First in 1963, followed by a masters in economics. After a brief three-year stint at the World Bank, he returned to Oxford, which remained his base thereafter. At Oxford, he was closely associated with Queen Elizabeth House and Green College.

As an academic economist, Sanjaya Lall was amazingly prolific and produced many books and over a hundred papers. But he was also involved in activities outside the ivory tower and acted as an adviser or consultant to many governments and international organizations.

His pioneering contributions centred on two main areas. The first concerned the role of foreign investment and multinationals in developing countries. One of the highlights of this work was a theoretical and empirical investigation of ?transfer pricing?, a device by which multinationals shift profits from one location to another in order to minimize their tax liabilities. Recently, he had also begun to illuminate the operations of third-world multinationals.

Analysing roles

His second area of research was the acquisition of technological capability in developing countries. Technology is a difficult topic which economists mostly prefer to avoid. Lall belonged to that select band of economists who tackled technology head-on. His view was that the assimilation of technology does not happen automatically, and the state has a crucial role to play in the development of technological capability. He argued in this connection that the spectacular performance of the fast-growing east Asian economies was built on state-led policies to acquire and generate technological capability. This later became a fashionable view.

A related contribution of his work was a nuanced analysis of the role of multinationals and foreign direct investment in technology transfer. He showed that the influence of multinationals can be benign or malign depending on the circumstances, which include government policies in host countries.

Grounded in reality

The hallmark of Lall?s work was that it was firmly grounded in empirical reality. He was not an armchair theorist and believed in getting his hands dirty, visiting shop-floors and factories, talking to workers, managers and policymakers. As a result, his writing was always policy-relevant and did not suffer from the rather abstract, unreal quality of much of the output of academic economists.

Sanjaya Lall?s life was far more than the sum of his work. He had a wide circle of friends and his elegant home was always open to them. He had highly cultivated sensibilities and was passionately fond of opera and classical music. He was deeply devoted to his wife Rani, and their three children, Maya, Priya and Ranjit. He was modest and self-deprecating to a fault, and unfailingly kind and courteous. But his generosity of spirit co-existed with a tough and uncompromising intellect. He died at the peak of his powers, at a point when he could have brought together the various strands of his thinking into a grand synthesis.