Ragnar Wilhelm Nurkse (5 October 1907,[a] Käru, Estonia – 6 May 1959, Le Mont-Pèlerin, Switzerland) was an Estonian-American[1] economist and policy maker mainly in the fields of international finance and economic development.
[2] Ragnar Nurkse was born in Käru village, in the then Governorate of Livonia of the former Russian Empire (now in Järva County, Estonia), son of an Estonian father who worked himself up from lumberjack to estate manager, and an Estonian-Swedish mother.
[3] He was influential for his criticism of floating exchange rates, which he argued were at fault for the economic crises of the interwar period.
He was a visiting lecturer at the university from 1945 to 1946, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1946 to 1947, and then returned to Columbia as an associate professor of economics in 1947.
In 1958, Ragnar Nurkse accepted a Professorship of Economics and the Director of International Finance Section position at Princeton University.
However, before he could fully resume it, when Nurkse returned to Geneva in the spring of 1959, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 51.