Jenny Lanjouw (1962 to November 1, 2005) was a deep thinker who made seminal contributions to research and public policy. She was an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Non-resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies and Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C., and a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She consulted for the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and statistical organizations in South Africa and Brazil. She was formerly an Assistant and an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Yale University.
Most of her research concerned assessing and addressing the plight of the poor in developing countries. This involved methodological work in the field of poverty measurement, but also involved the detailed study of the performance of institutions—such as intellectual property rights in the pharmaceutical sector—as mechanisms for making new drugs available and accessible to the poor.
Working with her beloved husband, Peter Lanjouw, and others, she combined multiple data sources to estimate poverty and inequality in neighborhoods or towns. This work was aimed at understanding and eventually counteracting poverty in developing countries. She also studied the role of property rights in developing countries, such as the importance to squatters in urban areas of formal title to land.
Her research and much of her policy proposals concerned domestic and international property rights. She examined the degree to which patent litigation served as a barrier to entry into innovative high-tech industries and how patents provide incentives for research and development. Her research on international issues examined the effects of the World Trade Organization requirement that forced many developing countries to introduce pharmaceutical patents. Based on her research, she developed a policy mechanism that would create a global patent system tailored to differences in countries' development levels and to the importance of product markets.
Toward the end of her life, her work on how to finance pharmaceutical innovations for developing countries began to attract substantial attention throughout the world. Her proposal for a mechanism that would permit the poorest countries in the world to preserve access to drugs at the lowest possible cost, without compromising their adherence to global patenting agreements was widely disseminated and discussed in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, as well as the World Development Report 2006 on Equity and Development. She advised trade negotiators for a wide variety of countries and participated in a number of international debates on a variety of issues concerning drug access in developing countries.
Bronwyn Hall, one of the world's most respected researchers on intellectual property, writes that Jenny "was always a heroine of mine—with her boundless energy, positive outlook and the effort she devoted to the crusade for generics in the third world."
Dr. Berk Özler, Development Research Group, The World Bank, observed that Jenny "was passionate to turn the ideas in her academic research into reality and she traveled tirelessly from India to Switzerland, Berkeley to the Research Triangle, and to the Congress in Washington, D.C. to promote better access to generic drugs in poor countries."
Jenny was also an empathetic and effective teacher who is sorely missed by her students. Students praised her friendliness, her use of extremely recent material, and her sharing of her own research and public policy experiences. One student wrote that she was "one of the friendliest, most accessible professors I have ever had. This resulted in an excellent, open, creative discussion environment in the classroom."
Jenny obtained her A.B. in Mathematics and Economics (summa cum laude) from Miami University; attended the Masters Program in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, India; and received both her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics, U.K.
In addition to publishing in a wide variety of academic journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, The Economic Journal, The Journal of Development Economics, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, she organized several conferences on patent reform and statistics. She was also an Honorary Fellow, Amsterdam Institute for International Development and an Associate Editor for Economic Development and Cultural Change.
She is survived by her husband Peter (42), her daughter Else (3), her son Max (6), her parents Joann Olson and Bruce Olson, and her brother Rick (42). Jenny was a warm, caring, bright person who will be greatly missed by her family, her colleagues, her students, and her many friends around the world.
Please follow this link for information on contributions to the Jean O. Lanjouw Memorial Fund .