Joseph P. Kalt is the Ford Foundation Professor (Emeritus) of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 1987, Prof. Kalt founded (with Stephen Cornell) the Harvard Kennedy School Project on Indigenous Governance and Development (formerly, the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development). He continues to serve as the Project’s director. From 2000 to 2006, Prof. Kalt served as the faculty chair of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), where he provided faculty support for the successful effort to secure continuously renewing University support for the Program. In 2023, Prof. Kalt and his wife, Judy Gans, endowed the Senior Fellowship in Indigenous Governance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, ensuring in perpetuity that among the world leaders Harvard routinely hosts will be accomplished and inspiring leaders in Indigenous governance and development.
Prof. Kalt is a principal author of The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination (with the Harvard Project), co-editor and a primary author of What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Institutions in the Economic Development of American Indian Reservations (with Stephen Cornell), a principal author of Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development (ed. M. Jorgensen), and co-editor of Universities and Indian Country (with Dennis Norman). He is vice-chairman of the Board of the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s Fort Apache Heritage Foundation, Inc., serves as a member of the Board of the Sonoran Institute, and was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Native Governance Center. Prof. Kalt has also served on the Navajo Nation’s President’s Council of Economic Advisors, and is on the advisory board of the Chickasaw Nation’s Community Development Entity. In Canada, he has provided advice and research to the Assembly of First Nations, Honouring Nations Canada, the Department of Indian and Northern Development, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and numerous First Nations.
Prof. Kalt received his B.A. degree in economics from Stanford University, and his Master’s and PhD degrees in economics from UCLA. An expert in antitrust, regulation, and international trade, Prof. Kalt served as a senior economist with Compass Lexecon Consulting and its predecessors for more than twenty-five years before stepping down in 2019. From 1992 through 2018, he served as the lead economic expert for the federal and provincial governments of Canada in the long-running Softwood Lumber Dispute between Canada and the United States.
Prof. Kalt and his wife, Judy, now reside in his hometown of Tucson, Arizona and in Carbon County, Montana.