Michael Paul Todaro (born May 14, 1942) is an American economist and a pioneer in the field of development economics.
Todaro earned a PhD in economics from Yale University in 1968 for a thesis titled The Urban Employment Problem in Less Developed Countries – An Analysis of Demand and Supply.[1] Todaro was Professor of Economics at New York University for eighteen years and Senior Associate at the Population Council for thirty years. He lived and taught in Africa for six years. He appears in Who's Who in Economics and Economists of the Twentieth Century. He is also the author of eight books and more than fifty professional articles. In a special February 2011 centenary edition, the American Economic Review selected Todaro’s article “Migration, Unemployment and Development: A 2-Sector Analysis” (with John Harris) as one of the twenty most important articles published by that journal during the first one hundred years of its existence.[2] He is the co-author of the widely used textbook, Economic Development, 12th Edition, published in 2014.[3]