Thorvaldur Gylfason (Icelandic orthography Þorvaldur Gylfason; born 18 July 1951) is an Icelandic economist and composer who has been active in Icelandic public life as well as internationally. His research explores, among others, the relationship between natural resources and economic growth, focusing on the potential for resource-rich countries to transition from excessive resource dependence to economic and political diversification, including democracy.
Education Following his matriculation from Reykjavik College in 1970, he received his B.A. (Honours) degree in economics at the University of Manchester in 1973. He earned his Ph.D. degree in economics at Princeton University in 1976, with a dissertation entitled Inflation, Unemployment, and Economic Growth: Two Essays, supervised by Professor William H. Branson.
Constitution of Iceland On 27 November 2010, he was elected to be a delegate at the 2011 Icelandic Constitutional Assembly, which, after four months’ deliberations, unanimously adopted and then delivered to Parliament a bill that was subsequently accepted as a basis for a new Icelandic constitution with 67% of the vote in a national referendum called by Parliament in 2012, but the bill remains to be ratified by Parliament. In 2013, he led Democracy Watch, a political party contesting the April 2013 parliamentary election in Iceland in support of the new constitution against Parliament’s failure to ratify the bill, but without success. The bill contains important judicial reforms, not least by defining Iceland´s natural resources as the “common and perpetual property of the nation” and by prescribing “equal weight” of votes cast in parliamentary elections, among other provisions aiming to strengthen democracy, environmental protection and more.
Career Gylfason has been professor of economics at the University of Iceland since 1983, research professor 1998–2004, and professor emeritus since 2021. He was visiting professor of public and international affairs at Princeton 1986–1988. Prior to this he was an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, DC, 1976–1981, in the Exchange and Trade Relations Department (ETR) and briefly the Asian Department, and thereafter a frequent consultant to the Fund until 2013, in the Research Department and the IMF Institute for Capacity Development. Thorvaldur has been active in economic research, teaching, and international policy advice and debate as senior research fellow at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University 1978–1996, research associate at the Center for Business and Policy Studies (SNS) in Stockholm 1996–2004, research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London 1987–2009, external research fellow at the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource-Rich Economies (Oxcarre) at Oxford since 2007, and research associate at the Center for Economic Studies (CESifo) at LMU Munich since 1999. He was one of five editors of the European Economic Review 2002–2010 and is a fellow of the European Economic Association where he was Council Member (elected position) 1992–1996. Further, he has been and remains associate editor of several international economics journals. In addition to the IMF, he has been a consultant to the World Bank, the European Commission, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as well as the Central Bank of Iceland 1984–1993. He was during 1986–1990 chair of the Board of Directors of Kaupthing, a successful securities firm which, following a 2003 merger with the Agricultural Bank of Iceland, then a newly privatized state bank, went astray and collapsed in 2008 with the rest of Iceland’s financial system. He held short-term visiting research positions at CESifo in Munich in 1999, University of Copenhagen 2000, Stockholm School of Economics 2010, 2012, and 2017, and Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2019. During 1988–1994 he was chair of the Board of Directors of the Icelandic Opera Society. Since 2010, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Reykjavík Vocal Academy.
Publications In the field of economics, Gylfason has published some 300 scientific papers in international journals and books as well as numerous books, including eight volumes of essays in his native Icelandic and four books of sheet music containing his compositions. He co-authored Understanding the Market Economy (1992) with Arne Jon Isachsen and Carl B. Hamilton, a book that was translated into 17 languages, including Russian and Chinese, one of the first books introducing mainstream economics to readers in formerly communist countries. He also co-authored The Swedish Model under Stress: A View from the Stands (1997) with Torben Andersen, Seppo Honkapohja, Arne Jon Isachsen, and John Williamson and also Nordics in Global Crisis: Vulnerability and Resilience (2010) with Nobel laurate Bengt Holmström, Sixten Korkman, Hans Tson Söderström, and Vesa Vihriälä. He is the sole author of Principles of Economic Growth (1999), a nontechnical exposition of economic growth theory, published like Understanding the Market Economy by Oxford University Press. He remains an active scholar. He has visited 100 countries, mostly for work, and worked with 36 co-authors from 18 countries. Recently, he has published a series of papers on Iceland's new constitution, another series comparing economic development in the three Baltic countries and Ukraine with their neighbors (with Eduard Hochreiter and Tadeusz Kowalski), yet another series of comparative papers on Uganda, Mongolia, and Madagascar (with Jean-Pascal Nguessa Nganou), and one more series on natural resources and their management (with Gylfi Zoega). With a focus on macroeconomics, international economics, economic growth, natural resources, and constitutions, his research has accumulated over 12,000 citations. His most frequently cited works are:
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