Professor Donald Jasper Harris yesterday said he was “honoured and humbled” by his country’s decision to confer on him the Order of Merit (OM), Jamaica’s third-highest national honour and expressed appreciation for the recognition of his work.

Professor Harris heads the list of about 140 people who are being honoured at this year’s National Awards and Honours ceremony scheduled for October when the nation celebrates its national heroes.

He joins a prestigious group of individuals who have been similarly honoured over the years, including Jamaica’s world-renowned trio of musicians Robert Nesta “Bob” Marley, Peter Tosh, and Neville O’Riley Livingston better known as Bunny Wailer; singer composer Jimmy Cliff; Jamaican-born bass-baritone Sir Willard White; the late Prime Minister Michael Manley; and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro.

Harris, who will observe his 83rd birthday on August 23, is a Jamaican American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is best known for applying post-Keynesian ideas to development economics.

Born in Brown’s Town, St Ann, the same parish as Marley, Harris has Afro-Jamaican and Irish Jamaican heritage. He grew up in the Orange Hill area of St Ann, near Brown’s Town and received his secondary level school education at Titchfield High School in Port Antonio.

He also studied at University College of the West Indies, the predecessor to The University of the West Indies, and earned a bachelor of arts from University of London in 1960 and a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, in 1966.

His doctoral dissertation, ‘Inflation, Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth: A Theoretical and Numerical Analysis’, was supervised by econometrician Daniel McFadden.

He is the husband of fellow Jamaican and World Bank staffer Carol Kirlew and father of the 49th and current Vice-President of the United States Kamala Harris and her sister, lawyer and political commentator, Maya Harris.

Despite becoming an American citizen, Harris has continued to work on economic analysis and policy regarding the economy of Jamaica, which he still regards as his native country. He has served here, at various times, as economic policy consultant to the Government of Jamaica and as economic adviser to successive prime ministers.

“I think of myself as ‘a likkle country boy’ from Brown’s Town in St Ann who got started in life with a level of social awareness and sense of belonging and love of country that were given to me by my early upbringing in that little community,” Professor Harris said when he was contacted by the Jamaica Observer yesterday for a reaction to the national honour.

“It made me commit to a lifetime of study and learning and analysis to understand what accounts for the inequality that I continued to keenly observe in the conditions of economic life for people around me and in the world at large, and to search for public policies to improve those conditions,” he said.

“In that process I also sought to give back in terms of service to the country and community that brought me up. That remains today as a core value in my thinking and my work.”

Veteran politician, trade unionist, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Pearnel Charles Sr; former Leader of the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) and current Member of Parliament for St Andrew East Central Dr Peter Philips; world-renowned Jamaican guitarist Ernest “Ernie” Rangling; and prominent businessman and philanthropist Ian Kent Levy will receive the Order of Jamaica.

Track and field sprinters Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Elaine Thompson-Herah are to receive the Order of Distinction (Commander Class).

Also receiving the Order of Distinction (Commander Class) are Mayor of Kingston, Councillor Delroy Williams; Minister of Transport and Mining Robert Montague; Speaker of the House of Representatives Marisa Dalrymple-Philibert; Professor Anthony Harriott; businessman and philanthropist Mark Jarrett; Jamaican fashion designer, 82-year-old Mercedes “Sadie” Jackson Soas; Dr Upton Allen, child health specialist; former Bankers’ Association President Elon Beckford; Rev Merrick “Al” Miller; prominent attorney-at-law and Queen’s Counsel Walter Scott; and communications consultant Carmen Tipling.

— Balford Henry contributed to this story