Professor Kapur has focused in particular on India, and the impact of international institutions and diasporas on India. He is completing a book manuscript, under contract with Princeton University Press, entitled Democracy, Death and Diamonds: The Impact of Migration From India on India.

Professor Kapur holds a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University; an MS in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota; and a PhD from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Selected Publications

Books

Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World (with John McHale). Center for Global Development, 2006. [HTML]

Public Institutions in India:Performance and Design (with Pratap Mehta). Oxford University Press, 2005. [HTML]

The World Bank: Its First Half Century(with John P. Lewis and Richard Webb). Brookings Institution Press, 1997. 2 vols. [HTML]

Refereed Papers

Devesh Kapur and Richard Webb. 2007. "Beyond the IMF," UNCTAD, G-24 Discussion Paper No. 43, February. [PDF]

Yoshiko M. Herrera. 2007. "Improving Data Quality: Actors, Incentives, and Capabilities," /Political Analysis/, 15:365–386 [PDF]

Ajay Agrawal, Devesh Kapur and John McHale, "How Do Spatial and Social Proximity Influence Knowledge Flows? Evidence from Patent Data," forthcoming, /Journal of Urban Economics. [PDF]

Mihir A. Desai, Devesh Kapur, John McHale, Keith Rogers. "The Fiscal Impact of High Skilled Emigration: Flows of Indians to the U.S." forthcoming /Journal of Development Economics/. [PDF]

Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “Mortgaging the Future? Indian Higher Education,” forthcoming Brookings-NCAER India Policy Forum 2007. [PDF]

"The Indian Parliament as an Institution of Account ability" (with Pratap Mehta). Paper no. 23, Democracy, Governance and Human Rights series. (Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2006). [PDF]

The IMF and Democracy (with Moises Naim), Journal of Democracy (January 2005). [PDF]

"The Causes and Consequences of India's IT Boom," India Review vol. 1, no. 2 (April 2002). [PDF]

"The Common Pool Dilemma of Global Public Goods: Lessons from the World Bank's Net Income and Reserves," World Development vol. 30, no. 3 (March 2002). [PDF]

"Diasporas and Technology Transfer," Journal of Human Development vol. 2, no. 2 (July 2001). [PDF]

"Expansive Agendas and Weak Instruments: Governance Related Conditionalities of International Financial Institutions," Journal of Policy Reform vol. 4, no. 3. (2001). [PDF]

Book Chapters

"Privatization in India: The Imperatives and Consequences of Gradualism" (with Ravi Ramamurti), in Srinivasan (ed.), India After a Decade of Economic Reforms: Retrospect and Prospects. Stanford Univeristy Press, forthcoming. [PDF]

The Knowledge Bank in Birdsall (ed.), The Future of the World Bank. Center for Global Development, forthcoming. [PDF]

Outsourcing and International Labor Mobility: A Political Economy Analysis”(with Sanjay Jain and Sharun Mukund), in Foders and Langhammer (eds.), Labor Mobility and the World Economy. Springer Publishers, 2006. [PDF]

Sojourns and Software: Internationally Mobile Human Capital and High-Tech Industry Development in India, Ireland and Israel” (with John McHale), in Arora and Gambardella (eds.), From Underdogs to Tigers: The Rise and Growth of the Software Industry in Some Emerging Economies. Oxford University Press, 2005. [PDF]

Working Papers

"Beyond the ABCs: Higher Education and Developing Countries", Devesh Kapur and Megan Crowley, February 2008, Center for Global Development [PDF]

"Remittances: The New Development Mantra?" G-24 Discussion Paper Series no. 29 (New York and Geneva, UN Conference on Trade and Development, 2004). [PDF]

"Indian Higher Education Reform: From Half-Baked Socialism to Half-Baked Capitalism" (with Pratap Mehta). CID Working Paper No. 108. (Cambridge: Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2004). [PDF]

"Sharing the Spoils: Taxing International Human Capital Flows" (with Mihir A. Desai and John McHale). Paper no. 02-06 (Cambridge: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, 2002). [PDF]

Essays & Reviews

“Are the Indian armed forces facing a human capital crisis?” Devesh Kapur, Op-Ed in The Indian Express newspaper March 27, 2008 [PDF]

"Developing Countries Worse Off Than Once Thought – Part II", Devesh Kapur, February 13, 2008, YaleGlobal [PDF]

"India's Poor: From Raw Deal to New Deal," by Devesh Kapur, Partha Mukhopadhyay and Arvind Subramanian, Op-Ed in Business Standard newspaper January 15, 2008 [PDF]

"Between a love fest and a bureaucratic wall", Devesh Kapur, January 11, 2008, India in Transition. [PDF]

"India-US relations. What does the Indian public think?", Devesh Kapur, November 05, 2007, India in Transition. [PDF]

"Primary Concerns" (with Sunil Khilnani). Hindustan Times, April 23, 2006. [PDF]

"India's Promise?" Harvard Magazine (July-August 2005). [PDF]

"The Indian diaspora as a strategic asset", Economic and Political Weekly (February 1-7, 2003). [PDF]

"Migration's New Payoff, Foreign Policy, (November/December, 2003). [PDF]

"Firm Opinions, Infirm Facts," Seminar India no. 538. [PDF]

"Who Gets to Run the World?" Foreign Policy (Nov-Dec 2000). [PDF]

"The IMF: A Cure or A Curse?" Foreign Policy (Summer 1998). [PDF]

Affiliations & Memberships

Center for Global Development, nonresident fellow
The Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford, senior associate
Brookings - NCAER India Panel
Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), board of directors