The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize was awarded by the Broadbent Institute to economist Dr. Isabella Weber—for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with policy alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy decisions, and help to empower workers. The award was announced on Friday, April 12th at the 2024 Progress Summit by Broadbent Institute Executive Director Jen Hassum.
The Broadbent Institute’s 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture, delivered by the recipient of the Prize, will take place at a keynote event at Toronto Metropolitan University on Thursday, May 30th at 7pm EDT. Early-bird tickets are now available.
Isabella Weber has become a leading voice on policy responses to inflation and has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization. For her public policy work she has been profiled in the New Yorker, recognized as one of TIME100 Next, Bloomberg's 50 Ones to Watch, Germany's 100 women of 2022 and Capital 40 under 40.
Isabella’s first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize, the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award and the Keynes Price and has been recommended on best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, ProMarket and Folha de S.Paulo among others. The book has been translated into German, Portuguese and Persian.
Her writings have appeared in the Washington Post, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and Süddeutsche Zeitung. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Keynesian Economics, the Review of Political Economy and on the advisory board of Environment and Planning A and a member of the Program Committee of the International Economics Association World Congress. Previously she was a tenured Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.
