Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati (born July 26, 1934) is an Indian-born naturalized American economist and one of the most influential trade theorists of his generation.

This view is shared by his peers including Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, "The crucial point for me is that people didn’t understand at all clearly how distortions in a trading economy relate to policy before Jagdish spelled it out.

Bhagwati and Desai's joint 1970 OECD study India: Planning for Industrialization was a notable contribution at the time.

He then returned to American academia and from 1968 until 1980, Bhagwati was the Ford International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bhagwati is a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

In 2006, Bhagwati was a part of the Eminent Persons Group along with Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso on the future of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Jagdish Bhagwati was the fictional winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in The Simpsons episode "Elementary School Musical".

Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, on the occasion of Bhagwati's 70th birthday festschrift conference in Gainesville, Florida in January 2005 said: I measure a scholar's prolific-ness not by the mere number of his publishings.

Just as the area of a rectangle equals its width times its depth, the quality of a lifetime accomplishment must weight each article by its novelties and wisdoms.