Neva Goodwin

Neva Goodwin (GRS ’88) is a member of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center Alumni Advisory Board and is a Distinguished Fellow with the Boston University Economics in Context Initiative. She is active in a variety of attempts to systematize and institutionalize an economic theory–“contextual economics”– that will have more relevance to contemporary real world concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm. She has edited more than a dozen books and is the lead author of four introductory textbooks: Microeconomics in Context, Macroeconomics in Context, Principles of Economics in Context and Essentials of Economics in Context. A Transitional Economies Edition was translated into Russian and Vietnamese, and a European edition of the macro text has been published.

Over the past decade, Dr. Goodwin has led the creation of a “social science library” called Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being, which contains nearly 10,000 full bibliographic references, representing seven social sciences, and includes full-text PDFs for a third of the referenced articles and book chapters. This was distributed widely in 100 developing and transitional countries, with special efforts to reach institutions with poor or no internet access; it is now being prepared for open access world wide. Dr. Goodwin received her MPA from Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD in economics from Boston University.