The University of the West Indies, Mona is pleased to announce the promotion of Mark Figueroa, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics, Mona to the position of Professor, with effect from February 9, 2011.

Mark Figueroa holds the Bachelor of Arts, and Master of Sciences degrees in Economics from The University of the West Indies, Mona and the Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He joined the staff of Department of Economics as a Teaching Assistant in 1974, was appointed Lecturer in 1978 and further promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2003.  He has served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences since 2004.

His work covers various aspects of the political economy of the Caribbean. He is a leading scholar of the history of development policy and economic thought in the Caribbean. In particular, he has clarified the insights of the critical tradition in Caribbean economics including those of the region’s most outstanding economist, Noble Laureate W. Arthur Lewis, and has demonstrated that much has been lost by the tendency among Caribbean economists to focus on their differences rather than points of consensus.

His work on garrison communities in Jamaica has demonstrated how electoral data can be used to track their growth and has detailed their impact on political culture and resulting negative socioeconomic outcomes for the country.

He has made significant interventions in debates regarding gender as it relates to education, health and leadership. In particularly, he has shown how the decline in the relative educational achievement of males can be linked to long-established male privileges rather than any new tendencies towards marginalizing males.

As a member of the Caribbean Diaspora Economy Research Group, he has made a distinctive contribution towards a classification system for the collection of data on and the analysis of migration which aids our ability to forecast whether remittances can be sustained at current levels in the future.

His work has been published in regional and international journals, including Social and Economic Studies, Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, Journal of Business, Finance and Economics in Emerging Economies, Manchester School of Social and Economic Studies, Journal of Developing Areas, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Disability and Society and Applied Economic Letters; and he has been professionally involve in most of the counties of the Caribbean basin (covering all the main language group) and has also presented his work in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

His leadership record within UWI includes in addition to being Dean, serving as Head of Economics and President and Chief Negotiator for the West Indies Group of University Teachers. Among his innovative contributions are the: first summer school for students in degree programmes, Committee for Students with Disabilities and most recently, teaching of weekend degree programmes in Social Sciences.

As a teacher, he has been active in curriculum reform and helped to launch new courses and programmes, including the History of Economic Thought, Caribbean Economic Thought and Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development/Environmental Management as well as the BSc in Business Economics and Social Statistics (BESS).

Over the years he has been an advisory to or consultant on various projects associated with entities such as the Canadian International Development Agency, the Caribbean Development Bank, Caribbean Studies Association, Commonwealth Secretariat, Disabled Peoples’ International, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Government of Jamaica, Government of Grenada, United Nations Development Fund for Women and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research. In the 1970s and 1980s he was very active in the public media and has more recently served as a director on the boards of environmental organizations.

He has received several awards for his achievements including the UWI Mona Principal Research Day Award for Best Article in the Faculty of Social Sciences for six of his articles between 2003 and 2011 as well as the Research Day Award for Most Outstanding Researcher in the Social Sciences in 2005 and 2011.