Anwar M. Shaikh (Sindhi: انور شيخ) is a Pakistani American heterodox economist in the tradition of classical political economy and Marxian economics.

He traveled extensively at an early age and attended schools and lived for various lengths of time in Ankara, Washington, D.C., New York City, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, and Kuwait.

He always found neoclassical economics unpersuasive, and the quest for more solid foundations led him to the works of John Maynard Keynes, Roy Harrod, Wassily Leontief, Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa and Luigi Pasinetti, and subsequently to Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx.

[3] Carrying on teaching and research that originated in the context of New Left social movements, Shaikh's political economy has focused on the laws of motion and empirical patterns of industrialized capitalism, based on a theory of competition independent of neoclassical economics.

Shaikh argues that even neo-Ricardian economics, whose revival was sparked by Sraffa's classic work, relies heavily on the neoclassical concepts of perfect competition and of equilibrium as an attained-and-held state.

Turbulent regulation is the resulting process of perpetual overshooting and undershooting of actual economic variables (such as prices, wages and profit rates) around their ever-moving centers of gravity.

In his earlier work, he used this notion to develop a theory of long waves and crises based on the Marxian concept of falling rate of profit.

[4] This was a stinging critique of Robert Solow's famous article on the measurement of technical change,[5] following up on a similar criticism of cross-section production functions by Simon and Levy (1963).

Further articles by Shaikh in this vein appeared in 1980, 1986, and 2005, the last being in a special journal issue devoted to the subject that included contributions by Felipe, McCombie, and Franklin M. Fisher.