Arthur Cecil Pigou

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) was an English economist and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, where he held the position from 1908 until 1943. He is best known for his work in welfare economics, particularly his 1920 book The Economics of Welfare, in which he developed the concept of externalities and proposed that negative externalities be corrected through taxation. His ideas on externality-correcting taxes, now known as Pigovian taxes, remain central to modern welfare and environmental economics, including their application to pollution and carbon pricing.