For Immediate Release:  January 12, 2007
Contact:  Marsha Nishi Mullan    
610-328-8535     
http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/

Pryor Receives National Prize for Best Economics Article

Frederic Pryor, emeritus professor of economics and senior research scholar at Swarthmore College, has received the J. Michael Montias Prize from the Association of Comparative Economic Studies. The Montias Prize honors the lifetime achievements of the late J. Michael Montias, an emeritus professor of economics at Yale University, author of The Structure of Economic Systems and Central Planning in Poland, and founding editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics. The prize is awarded every other year to the author of the best overall paper published in the Journal of Comparative Economics.

Pryor's winning paper focuses on industrial economies and presents a new statistical method for classifying economic systems and linking such systems to their economic performance. He received the award at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and the Association for Comparative Economics on January 7 in Chicago.

Pryor taught at Swarthmore from 1967 to 1998. His teaching specialty was the comparative study of economic systems with a focus on communist economies in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. He has also served as an economic consultant in the Ukraine for the Soros Group, in various African countries for the World Bank, in Washington for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and in Pennsylvania for the state tax commission. Additionally, he has worked as a research associate at the Hoover Institution in California and at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He has written 12 books and published more than 100 scholarly articles. Most of these writings concern the economic and social impact of various economic systems over the last 10,000 years, but he has also written on the economic consequences of different religions, the possibility of wars over water, and what it means to be human by comparing human and non-human primate economies.

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