Lans Bovenberg awarded Netherlands Prize for Political Economy
Emeritus Professor of Economics Lans Bovenberg has been awarded the Netherlands Prize for Political Economy. This oeuvre prize is awarded once every three years to an economist who has made a significant contribution to economic science. Lans Bovenberg is receiving the prize in recognition of his major and wide-ranging contribution to economic policy knowledge and his many publications in the Dutch and international professional literature. In 2003 he won the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific distinction in the Netherlands.
Lans Bovenberg was presented with the prize on 12 April by Klaas Knot, chairman of the board of the Mr. N.G. Pierson Fund and President of De Nederlandsche Bank, and Robert Dur, chairman of the board of the Royal Netherlands Association of Political Economy (KVS) and professor of Economics at Erasmus University.
About Lans Bovenberg
Lans Bovenberg (born 1958) is one of the leading and most innovative economists in the Netherlands and beyond. In 2003 he won the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific distinction in the Netherlands, for his research into green taxes. With the prize money, he set up the knowledge network Netspar for studies on pensions and aging. Among other causes, Bovenberg has argued for the raising of the pension age and a fairer allocation of the profits and risks of pension investments between generations. He has played an important role in the reform of the Dutch pension system.
Bovenberg was employed by Tilburg University for 33 years; since 2023, he has been an Emeritus Professor. He studied econometrics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and was awarded his PhD by the University of California. After returning to the Netherlands, he worked for the Ministry of Economic Affairs and as deputy director of the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). He was also a part-time professor at Erasmus University. In 1998, he was appointed Professor of General Economics at Tilburg University.
Bovenberg publishes in a range of different fields: public finance, macroeconomics and monetary economics, pensions and aging, environmental economics, institutional and financial economics, the labor market, work and care, healthcare, culture and economics, theology and economics, social security, privatization and market forces.
About the prize
The Netherlands Prize for Political Economy was formerly known as the Pierson Medal. The change of name follows the assumption of the activities of the Mr. N.G. Pierson Fund Foundation by the Royal Netherlands Association of Political Economy (KVS). The board of the Mr. N.G. Pierson Fund Foundation decided to wind up the foundation due to the involvement of the man after whom the fund was named, former DNB president Nicolaas Pierson, in the Netherlands’ slave-owning past.