Extending the Frontiers of Knowledge
The Graduate School of Economics was established over 100 hundred years ago, in 1906. Since then it has built up a distinguished reputation for research in almost all the fields covered by economics and in those subjects with important links to the discipline. We have over fifty full-time staff members, who between them offer a diverse range of conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches. The energy that results from pooling such a diversity of talent is one of the chief features of our School.
Although the School is a center of excellence in academic research, this does not mean that it is isolated from reality. Since its first emergence as an academic discipline, economics has played a vital role in helping us to understand and face the challenges of our turbulent world. Now, more than ever before, the world needs people with a high level of economic insight to meet the unprecedented challenges presented by the rapid pace of change in the global economy, and the fundamental shifts that are taking place in the overall balance of economic power. Issues such as the state of the environment and the graying of postindustrial societies also demand our attention. Our website gives evidence of the important contribution being made by our staff members. Under their guidance, our graduate students acquire a specialist training that will allow them to join us in advancing the frontiers of economic knowledge.
Our first aim is to turn students with an undergraduate knowledge of the fundamentals of economics into fully-fledged specialists who can use their abilities to benefit society. Second, we wish to show them how to apply their specialist knowledge effectively, so that they are always ready to reevaluate, and if necessary overturn, even the most established concepts and theories. By doing so, we will be passing on the pioneering approach to knowledge that we have inherited from our founder, Yukichi Fukuzawa, who pointed out that the intellectual advances of every age originate from “heretical nonsense”.
Chair, Professor Shinsuke Nakamura
