Professor P R Brahmananda, a renowned economist, died at his home in Bangalore on Thursday following a cardiac arrest, family sources said.

Brahmananda, 77, collapsed after writing an article for a business newspaper and died before he could be taken to a hospital, the sources said. He was a bachelor.

Beginning as a research assistant, he developed the much-hailed wage-goods model pleading for priority for agriculture and related wage goods.

With this work, Brahmananda left a major imprint and the model is well known in the world of development literature. His book Planning for a Wage Goods Economy was the first Indian book to be reviewed in most international journals.

Brahmananda played a pivotal role in building the Indian Economic Association. For nearly five decades, he was editing the Indian Economic Journal and was continuously elected as its managing editor.

Brahmananda, who treated economics as an eclectic science, was appointed president of the International Economic Association at its congress in Lisbon last year.

He has several works to his credit, including The Monetary History of India, which the Reserve Bank of India asked him to write. The first volume dealing with the 19th century was released in 2001 and he was working on the monetary history of the 20th century.