Mushtaq Khan (economist)

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Mushtaq Husain Khan (born 1961) is a British-Bangladeshi economist and professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He studies the economics of poor countries and has made important contributions to institutional economics and South Asian development. He is known for developing the concept of political settlement, a framework that explains how the distribution of power among different groups influences policies and institutions in a country.

Khan studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, earning a first-class BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1981. He then earned an MPhil at King’s College, Cambridge in 1982 and a PhD in 1989. From 1990 to 1996, he was a fellow and economics lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and also served as assistant director of development studies at Cambridge.

In 1996, Khan joined SOAS and was made a professor there in 2005. Beyond academia, he has worked as a consultant for many international institutions focusing on poor countries, including the World Bank, DFID, UNDP and the Asian Development Bank. He has also been a visiting professor at Chulalongkorn University and Dhaka University. His work has earned awards such as the Hans Singer Prize and the Frank Cass Prize. He is a regular commentator for the BBC Bengali service.

Khan’s research is known for its critique of orthodox “good governance” ideas promoted by Bretton Woods institutions and many NGOs. He argues that eliminating rents, corruption and rent-seeking, along with democratisation and decentralisation, are not proven prerequisites for development. There is little historical evidence for this sequencing, he says; instead, growth often comes after a state learns to transform rent-seeking into uses that support growth. He highlights the idea of “transformation potential”—the state's ability to steer rents toward productive uses. As examples, he cites Taiwan and South Korea, where strong state intervention and patron–client relationships helped drive growth.