Wim Naudé

Visiting Professor in Technology and Development, RWTH Aachen University

Wim Naudé (PhD) is Visiting Professor in Technology and Development at RWTH Aachen University, Germany; Fellow of the Africa Studies Centre at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Economics at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also an AI-Expert at the OECD’s AI Policy Observatory in Paris, France. A graduate of the University of Warwick (UK), he has held positions at the University of Oxford, United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) and University of Maastricht. As a member of the liberation movement in South Africa, Wim served for 5 years as an elected councilor for the African National Congress (ANC) in the first democratic local government in the country (2000-2006). South Africa's finance minister appointed him to the Council of Statistics South Africa in 2005. His current scholarly and policy work is concerned with planetary habitability, in particular, with the dynamics between economic growth, entrepreneurship, trade and technological innovation on the one hand, and their tensions with ecology, energy and equitable social outcomes on the other. His recent books on these have been published by Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, and Edward Elgar Publishers, and deals respectively with (1) the futility of green growth and degrowth to avert ecological crises, with (2) the Economics of Artificial Intelligence, and with (3) the relationship between entrepreneurship and violent conflict.