Kaushik Basu (born 9 January 1952) is an Indian economist who is currently the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and is also the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics and, till recently, he was Chairman of the Department of Economics and Director, Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell University.

Kaushik Basu was born in Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, and schooled at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata. In an autobiographical essay he noted that finishing school in 1969 he was caught in a dilemma. His father wanted him to study physics. But those were revolutionary times and he wanted to study nothing. They settled on economics as a half-way house between physics and nothing. In 1969 he moved to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics (Honors), with Mathematics as subsidiary, from St. Stephen's College. He then went on to the London School of Economics, to do his M.Sc in Economics completing it in 1974. Post his Master's, Basu was supposed to move to England to study law and take over his father's legal practice. But he had fallen in love with the concept of logic and deductive reasoning and came under the spell of Amartya Sen in his early days. He stayed on at the London School for his PhD, from 1974 to 1976. He did his PhD on choice theory under the chairmanship of Amartya Sen.