Indiana University East’s School of Business and Economics will offer its speaker series this spring featuring Victor V. Claar, Ph.D., associate professor of economics in the Lutgert College of Business at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.

Victor V. Claar

The topic “Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution,” will be presented from 2-3 p.m. on Monday, April 1, in Tom Raper Hall Room 124. The series is free and open to the public.

The series is sponsored by the Charles Koch Foundation and co-sponsored by Delta Mu Delta, the IU East Business and Economic Research Center and the IU East Center for Economic Education

The discussion topic on fair trade is an enormously popular idea in Christian and secular circles alike. Who, after all, could be against fairness? Claar raises significant economic and moral questions about both the logic and economic reasoning underlying the fair-trade movement. In this talk, Claar suggests that, for all its good intentions, fair trade may not be of particular service to the poor, especially in the developing world.

Claar is associate professor of economics in the Lutgert College of Business at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, where he holds the BB&T Distinguished Professorship in Free Enterprise. He holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Houghton College in New York, where he completed a second major in mathematics. He earned both his master’s and Ph.D. in economics at West Virginia University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Ronald Balvers.

Claar is a former Fulbright Scholar, having spent a year giving graduate lectures and conducting research at the American University of Armenia. While you may have heard that economics was once dubbed the “dismal science,” Claar’s work demonstrates that this field is quite the opposite, especially when it does what Claar does: combine sobering analysis and Christian principles to offer a vision of hope. He has a long record of publications, including his influential book, Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy and Life Choices, now in its tenth printing and recently translated into Chinese. Claar is also the author of Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution. His scholarly articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed outlets including Applied Economics, Public Finance Review, Faith & Economics, and the Journal of Markets & Morality. He currently serves the Acton Institute as an Affiliate Scholar in Economics. His latest book (with co-author Greg Forster), John Maynard Keynes and the Rise of Economic Materialism: We’re All Dead, is scheduled to be published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan.