| Colin Clark | |
| Born | November 2, 1905(1905-11-02) London, England |
|---|---|
| Died | September 4, 1989 (aged 86) |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Economics |
| Institutions | Oxford University,Cambridge University |
| Alma mater | Oxford University |
| Doctoral students | Sir Richard Stone V.K.R.V. Rao Sir Alexander Cairncross Hans Singer |
Colin Grant Clark (November 2, 1905 - September 4, 1989) was a British economist and statistician who worked in both the United Kingdom and Australia, and who pioneered the use of the gross national product ("GNP") as the basis for studying national economies.
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Colin Clark was born in London and educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, then at Winchester College, then at Brasenose College Oxford where he graduated in Chemistry in 1928. After graduation he worked as a research assistant with William Beveridge at the London School of Economics (1928-29) and then with Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders and Allyn Young at the University of Liverpool (1929-30). During this time he ran unsuccessful campaigns for Labour in the parliamentary seat of North Dorset (1929), and later for Liverpool (1930) and Wavertree and South Norfolk (1935). In 1930 he was appointed a research assistant to the Economic Advisory Council newly convened by Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald. He resigned shortly after his appointment, after being asked to write a background memorandum to make a case for protectionism, though he had sufficiently impressed one of the council members (John Maynard Keynes) to secure an appointment as a lecturer in statistics at Cambridge University.
He was a lecturer in Statistics in Cambridge from 1931 to 1938 where he completed three books: "The National Income 1924-31" (1932), "The Economic Position of Great Britain" (jointly with A.C Pigou) (1936) and "National Income and Outlay" (1937). His first book was sent to the publisher Daniel Macmillan with a recommendation from Keynes:
"[...] Clark is, I think, a bit of a genius: almost the only economic statistician I have ever met who seems to me quite first-class." [1]
During a visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1937 he accepted a position as the Director of the Queensland Bureau of Industry, Financial Advisor to the Queensland Treasury, and Queensland Government Statistician. Unusually for a public servant he continued his academic work, publishing numerous articles in Economics and preparing his book "Conditions of Economic Progress" which was published in 1950.
In 1951 he took a secondment to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome (1951) and then to the University of Chicago (1952) before taking the Directorship of the Institute for Agricultural Economics at Oxford University (1952-69). He returned to Australia in 1969 as the Director of the Institute of Economic Progress at Monash University (1969-78) and finally as a Research Consultant to the Department of Economics at the University of Queensland until his death in 1989.
Richard Stone, in his Nobel Prize Lecture, paid tribute to Clark's influence on his work:
"[...] the restoration of the synthetic vision of the political arithmeticians came in the 1930’s with the work of Colin Clark who in 1937, in his National Income and Outlay brought together estimates of income, output, consumers’ expenditure, government revenue and expenditure, capital formation, saving, foreign trade and the balance of payments. Although he did not set his figures in an accounting framework it is clear that they came fairly close to consistency. Clark was my teacher at Cambridge and his work was the main source of inspiration for mine."[2]
In 1984 he was named by the World Bank as one of the pioneers of development [1] along with Sir Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal, W.W. Rostow and Jan Tinbergen[3].
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