Abel Aganbegyan

In 1989–2002 he was the rector of the Academy of National Economy under the Government of the Russian Federation. He is a foreign member of the Bulgarian and the Hungarian Academies of Sciences, a correspondenting member of the British Academy.

In the late 1980s he was one of Mikhail Gorbachev's chief economic advisers and among the first Soviet economists to voice the need for a restructuring of the economic and business infrastructure of the Soviet Union. His ideas were presented in a number of ideological books on perestroika. He also supported the movement for the reunion of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.

Abel Gezevich Aganbegyan (Armenian: Աբել Գյոզի Աղանբեկյան; Russian: Абе́л Ге́зевич Аганбегя́н; born 8 October 1932) is a leading Soviet and Russian economist of Armenian descent, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctor of business administration of Kingston University, the founder and first editor of the journal EKO.

Aganbegyan was born on 8 October 1932 in Tiflis, Soviet Union (now Tbilisi, Georgia), a son of a senior CPSU official. Upon graduating from the Moscow State Economical Institute in 1956 he was employed by the Soviet government structure responsible for salary policy in the USSR. In 1961 he left the official work and started his scientific career. He became an employee of a new scientific institute in Novosibirsk which was quickly filled by young and ambitious persons from Moscow. An active member of the group of mathematical economists which emerged in the USSR in the 1960s, Aganbegyan became an Academy member in 1963 (full member in 1974) and the head of the institute in 1964. He was just 32 years old and had only one published book.