Anwar Mir Mohammed Shaikh is an American economist following the classic economic tradition. He has been a professor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York for more than 30 years and has been chair of the department for many terms. He received his first degree from Princeton University and his PhD from Columbia University in the USA. In 2009 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidad National Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru. He is an Associate Editor at the Cambridge Journal of Economics and a member of the Levy Economics Institute Macro-Model team at Bard College.

His scientific thinking has been significantly influenced by human rights movements in the United States and around the world. From a very early age he realized that the neoclassical economic tradition was not capable of giving convincing answers to problems of economic analysis and for this reason he turned to the works of great economists who did not follow this tradition such as Roy Harrod, Wassily Leontief, Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson , Piero Sraffa and Luigi Pasinetti. The continuation of this search led him to the written texts of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. The search for the modern political economy of developed capitalism is the mainstay of his scientific work. Thus, his research work in political economy focuses on economic theory and the empirical documentation of the behaviors of developed capitalism. His work focuses on international trade, financial theory, political economy, US macroeconomic policy, the welfare state, growth theory, inflation theory, crisis theory, global inequalities, and past and present global economic crises.

Anwar Shaikh's new book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises 2016, is an attempt to create an economic model that, combining the macro and micro aspects of economic growth and critique the traditional neoclassical approach, offers a completely different perspective on understanding of the functioning of the modern capitalist economic system. In 2016, the Department of Economics awarded him an honorary doctorate.