Professor Emeritus Alain de Janvry was awarded the prestigious Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, which is presented annually to one or more distinguished Emeriti to honor outstanding scholarly work or educational service performed since retirement by a University of California Emeritus or Emerita in the Humanities or Social Sciences.
His award and acheivements were celebrated with the UC Berkeley Emeriti Association at the Women's Faculty Club patio on September 8th, 2026 with family, friends, and colleagues in attendance.
View the remarks at last night's celebration which included a toast by Chancellor Lyons, an introduction by Jeff Perloff, and remarks by Alain de Janvry.
Congrats Alain!
2026 University of California Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award
Alain de Janvry’s response
Photo by Professor Max Auffhammer, September 8, 2026, Women’s Faculty Club Patio, U. C. Berkeley
Good afternoon, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons, UCLA vice-chancellor Michael Levine, members of the Panunzio Award selection committee, colleagues, family, and friends.
Thank you for the honor of receiving this award, and thank you for coming.
Thank you to Sofia Villas-Boas, my department chair, for very kindly putting up my candidacy, of course without telling me about it.
And thank you to my colleague Jeff Perloff for relaying her words of appreciation and for your own, especially about eventual contributions to building our international development group here on the Berkeley campus.
Let me very briefly address three topics in response to this honor: who I am, what I have done, and how I continue doing it. I will talk briefly, which is not always what university professors do best.
First, for the record, let me tell you who I am.
I am 87 years old.
I was born in France just a few weeks before the onset of WWII. My cultural background is thus that of what has been called the “30 glorious years” (1945-1975) of peace and transformation that followed the War, with rapid economic growth, the introduction of many social programs, and the construction of the European Union. A context favorable to having a positive outlook on what society can do. I studied agronomy and economics in Paris.
In 1961, while still a student, I was offered by the French government to go to Sub-Saharan Africa as part of an effort by France to maintain contact with the grassroots in the countries newly independent from colonial rule that happened in 1960. I was sent to Southern Chad, a region of tropical forests and slash-and-burn agriculture at the confines of the borders with Cameroon and the Central Africa Republic. My mission was to report on agricultural production under the new political regime, especially whether villagers were still producing cotton as the government wanted them to do or were massively shifting to food production for home consumption. For this, I had a Jeep, a driver, a cook, and a mosquito net, and for a couple of months went village to village to survey how the land was being used. This allowed me to live with the poor and experience their joys, songs, and dances every evening as the sun was setting, but also witness their hardships and pains, their lack of access to education and health, and discover how harsh and fragile life is under these conditions.
So, upon returning to France, I understood that I needed to know more to be potentially useful, and for this, I decided to pursue studies in the United States. I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship and landed at the International House here in Berkeley for a one-year stay, a year that I am still extending.
This was in 1962, when Kennedy was president. The Berkeley campus was boiling with energy and excitement. We thought we could change the world, for the better. And big changes did indeed happen.
I joined the faculty in 1967, retired at age 76 after 50 years, and have, by now, been an emeritus Professor in the Graduate School for 10 years. So, altogether it has been 64 years on this campus, from student to faculty to emeritus. I only had one job in my life, but this has been an incredible adventure. And it is still on-going as this award confirms.
The second topic is to briefly tell you what research I have been doing and am fortunate to continue doing.
I am an economist, working on international development issues.
My work has taken me to more than 70 countries as a Berkeley professor, researcher, policy advisor, and sometimes activist.
And to working with institutions such as the World Bank, the FAO, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Gates Foundations, USAID, and many other such development agencies. This was not only to gain access to the field and policymakers, but also to obtain resources to build teams and support graduate student research
The general objective of this work is to promote economic growth, human welfare, especially with a perspective on poverty, inequality, and equity, and sustainability in the use of natural resources, what we call development.
The way this is done is by seeking to understand and change behavior, increase access to opportunities, and re-design institutions that codify behavior.
In later years, I have principally used quantitative research techniques that include:
Randomized Controlled Trials, i.e., conducting experiments in the field.
And looking at history and secondary data (administrative, satellite, censuses, surveys) for what we call natural experiments.
These methods help us establish causality between determinants and outcomes, between policies and programs and impacts.
The purpose of this research was thus not only positive, that is, to understand what we see and why people and institutions do what they do, but also, very importantly, normative, that is, to design policies and programs to change what we do not like to see and promote development.
I thus worked with this approach on the whole range of development issues. Let me give you just four examples, and show you the surprises we tend to have when doing this type of research, surprises that usually derive from unexpected behavioral responses:
(1) A first example is access to land, the most important asset for farmers, for example, through Mexico’s massive land reform program that started in 1993 and affected half of the national territory. Land that had been allocated to the hacienda farmworkers under collective ownership or usufruct after the 1910 revolution was now individually titled to occupants. What we found is that secure property rights increased land productivity (as expected) but also induced large out-migration (a surprise). This is because a lot of family labor had been held captive on the land to physically protect it from potential invaders under incomplete property rights, and this became unnecessary once you had a legal title. Key for these land reforms to be effective is thus to provide access to local off-farm employment to absorb freed labor so it does not all go to the US border or to urban slums. Land reform is thus an agricultural policy that induces large behavioral responses, that in turn require interventions in industry (especially agro-industry) and services to be successful.
(2) A second example is the adoption of new technologies in agriculture in India and Bangladesh, especially for risk reduction. Take the case of flood-resistant rice varieties, for which the fundamental genetic work had been done at UC Davis. Not only do these varieties help avoid yield losses when flooding occurs, but they also induce farmers to change behavior as risk is being reduced. With lower risk, they invest more and work harder. We thus found that of the total impact on production induced by adoption, half came from the seed and (surprise) half from behavior. And behavior can be helped to enhance impact, particularly with attention to household heterogeneity of circumstances. Thanks to behavioral response, investment in agricultural research is made more profitable. Understanding this helps combat the well-known massive under-investment in agricultural research.
(3) A third example is Cash Transfers to the poor, in particular to poor farmers that tend to be the poorest of the poor. The key issue here is to get people out of poverty after the transfer. But the monetary transfer can be put to work. In Mexico, in a program of transfers associated with NAFTA, we found income multipliers on average equal to two (a surprise). Every peso you transferred generated another peso through investment and work. And here again, behavior can be helped to make multipliers as large as possible. This focus on managing multipliers is all the more important that cash transfers (call them Minimum Guaranteed Income or Negative Income Tax) are seen today by many as the main instrument to combat the impact of technological change (like AI) on rising unemployment.
(4) A last example is the design of insurance schemes for smallholder farmers. In this context, insurance must be of the index type, that is, where payouts are triggered by indices crossing thresholds when adverse events occur and not based on ex-post assessment of individual damages, which would be impossible when you insure thousands and often millions of smallholder farmers. We did this in China for rice, the most important staple crop. When we started, there was no crop insurance in China. We worked with the People’s Insurance Company of China and showed, with a randomized controlled trial, that trust and understanding are key to sustained adoption of this complex and imperfect insurance system. The interesting behavioral response was that of government. Today, every farmer in China is insured for risks to their crops, and for free, at public cost. This, of course, would have happened without us, but our UC Berkeley team was there at the right time, with the right people, and the right tools to make this experiment and produce impact.
And there are many more such stories. This research was always done as teamwork, with students, colleagues, and experts from the country where the research was done. The primary objective was impact, but it also resulted in good dissertations and publications. And this has been fun, every project turning into an adventure.
The last thing I want to mention is that I have been able to continue doing this research and policy work as an emeritus professor because of the extraordinary richness of programs and initiatives in international development on the UC Berkeley campus.
We have programs in international development, of course, in Agricultural and Resource Economics, my department, but also in the Economics Department, the Haas Business School, the Goldman School of Public Policy, the College of Engineering, the School of Public Health, the Blum Center, CEGA, the Center for Effective Global Action, and many others.
These programs make possible collaborations with younger colleagues and students. People of my age are lucky to be able to continue working with them, and benefit from their incredible energy, technical skills, creativity, and achievements.
So, to me, this has been the secret to continuing to work as an emeritus. I am grateful to our students. They should certainly share in the Panunzio Award.
For this reason, I have pledged the monetary reward that comes with this prize to a named fund honoring my dear recently deceased colleague and co-author, Elisabeth Sadoulet. This fund will support students’ fieldwork, especially that of PhD students at early stages of defining their research projects. Perhaps this will allow some of them to have their turn experiencing life in African villages and discovering problems of importance that they do not understand and that can potentially be changed.
So, thank you all for your support. I look at the honor of receiving this prize as one that recognizes the excellence of our UC ecosystem in international development, to which I am so lucky of having been associated for the past 64 years. And I look forward to more in the years to come!
Alain
l-r: UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons & ARE Professor Jeff Perloff with Alain
