W. Arthur Lewis

William Arthur Lewis was a Saint Lucian-born economist whose 1954 paper 'Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour' modeled how a traditional subsistence sector releases surplus labor into a modernizing industrial sector at a near-constant wage, becoming the founding formal framework of development economics. He taught at the London School of Economics, Manchester and Princeton, advised newly independent governments in Africa and the Caribbean directly, and in 1979 became the first person of African descent to win a Nobel Memorial Prize in any category, sharing the Economic Sciences prize with Theodore Schultz.