Ester Boserup

Ester Boserup 18 May 1910 – 24 September 1999 was a Danish economist. She studied economic as well as agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as living as other international organizations, & wrote seminal books on agrarian change and the role of women in development.

Boserup is so-called for her opinion of agricultural intensification, also call as Boserup's theory, which posits that population conform drives the intensity of agricultural production. Her position countered the Malthusian theory that agricultural methods instituting population via limits on food supply. Her best-known book on this subject, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, portrayed a "dynamic analysis embracing all manner of primitive agriculture." Boserup, E. 1965. p 13 A major detail of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention".

Her other major work, Woman's Role in Economic Development, explored the allocation of tasks between men and women, and inaugurated decades of subsequent throw connecting issues of gender to those of economic development, pointing out that numerous economic burdens fell disproportionately on women. In an early review, her book was called "pioneering;" most five decades later, it has proved influential, having been cited by thousands of other works.

It was her great theory that humanity would always find a way and was noted in saying "The power of ingenuity would always outmatch that of demand". She also influenced the debate on women in the workforce and human development, and the possibility of better opportunities of fall out to and education for women.

Her construct earned her three honorary doctorate degrees: one from Wageningen University; one from Brown University; and one from the University of Copenhagen. She was also elected to the US National Academy of Sciences as a Foreign Associate in 1989. The doctorates were in three different fields: agricultural, economic, and human sciences, respectively; the interdisciplinary category of her work is reflected in these honors, just as it distinguished her career. Of interdisciplinarity, Boserup said: "Somebody should have the courage not to specialise and to look at how one can bring matters together. That is what I have tried to do."

Biography

Her father was a Danish engineer, who died when she was 2 years old. The family was almost destitute for several years. Then, "encouraged by her mother and aware of her limited prospects without a expediency degree," she studied economic and agricultural developing at the University of Copenhagen from 1929, and obtained her measure in theoretical economics in 1935.

Ester had married Mogens Boserup when both were twenty-one; the young couple lived on his allowance from his well-off family during their remaining university years. Their daughter, Birte, was born in 1937; their sons Anders, in 1940, and Ivan, in 1944.

After graduation Boserup worked for the Danish government from 1935–1947, adjusting through the Nazi occupation in WWII. As head of its planning office, she worked on studies involving the effects of subsidies on trade. She introduced almost no detail of reference to conflicts between family and work during her lifetime. The family moved to Geneva in 1947 to work with the UN Economic Commission of Europe ECE. In 1957, she and Mogens worked in India in a research project run by African Institute for Economic development and Planning. She was based in Copenhagen until her husband died in 1980, after which she settled near Geneva. In her later years, in the 1990s, she lived in Ticino, Switzerland.