Colin Clark

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.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Honours 3 Publications 3.1 Selected Papers 3.2 Books 4 External links 5 References

Biography

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].

Honours

• Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
• Fellow of the Econometric Society [2].
• Colin Clark Lecture at The Australasian Meeting of the Econometric Society[3].
• Colin Clark building at The University of Queensland [4].
• Colin Clark room at Queensland Treasury.
• Colin Clark Memorial Lecture [5].
• HonDEcon Tilburg, DLitt Oxf., HonDSc Milan, HonDEcon University of Queensland.

Publications

Selected Papers

• "A System of Equations Explaining the United States Trade Cycle, 1921 to 1941," Econometrica, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Apr., 1949), pp. 93–124.

• "The Economic Functions of a City in Relation to Its Size," Econometrica, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1945), pp. 97–113.

• "Economic Development in Communist China," The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Apr., 1976), pp. 239–264.

• "Theory of Economic Growth," Econometrica, Vol. 17, Supplement: Report of the Washington Meeting (Jul., 1949), pp. 112–116.

• "The Measurement of National Wealth: Discussion," (with Milton Gilbert; J. R. N. Stone; Francois Perroux; D. K. Lieu; Evelpides; Francois Divisia; Tinbergen; Kuznets; Smithies; Shirras; MacGregor), Econometrica, Vol. 17, Supplement: Report of the Washington Meeting. (Jul., 1949), pp. 255–272.

• "A Critique of Russian Statistics by Colin Clark," Economica, May 1941, NS 8, p.212.

• "Russian Income and Production Statistics," The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Nov., 1947), pp. 215–217.

• "Afterthoughts on Paley," The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Aug., 1954), pp. 267–273.

• ""Mr. Colin Clark on the Limits of Taxation": A Rejoinder," The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Feb., 1954), p. 101.

• "The New Board of Trade Indexes," The Economic Journal, Vol. 45, No. 178 (Jun., 1935), pp. 370–375.

• "Determination of the Multiplier from National Income Statistics," The Economic Journal, Vol. 48, No. 191 (Sep., 1938), pp. 435–448.

• "Public Finance and Changes in the Value of Money," The Economic Journal, Vol. 55, No. 220 (Dec., 1945), pp. 371–389.

• "Further Data on the National Income," The Economic Journal, Vol. 44, No. 175 (Sep., 1934), pp. 380–397.

• "The Value of the Pound," The Economic Journal, Vol. 59, No. 234 (Jun., 1949), pp. 198–207.

• "National Income at Its Climax," The Economic Journal, Vol. 47, No. 186 (Jun., 1937), pp. 308–320.

• "World Supply and Requirements of Farm Products," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Vol. 117, No. 3 (1954), pp. 263–296

• "Future Sources of Food Supply: Economic Problems," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Vol. 125, No. 3 (1962), pp. 418–448

• "Urban Population Densities," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Vol. 114, No. 4 (1951), pp. 490–496

• "The National Income and The Net Output of Industry," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Vol. 96, No. 4 (1933), pp. 651–659

Books

• The National Income, 1924-31, 1932.
• The Economic Position of Great Britain, with A.C.Pigou, 1936.
• National Income and Outlay, 1937.
• A Critique of Russian Statistics, 1939.
• Conditions of Economic Progress, 1939.
• The Economics of 1960, 1942.
• Statistical Society
• Growthmanship, 1961.
• Economics of Subsistence Agriculture, with M.R. Haswell, 1964.
• Population Growth and Land Use, 1967.
• Starvation or Plenty?, 1970.
• Poverty Before Politics, 1977.
• The Economics of Irrigation with J. Carruthers, 1981.
• Regional and Urban Location, 1982.

External links

• Meier, G.M. and Seers, D. (eds) 1984, Pioneers in Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank
• Colin Clark as a development economist H.W. Arndt
• Colin G. Clark, 1905-
• The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition - Clark, Colin
• Daniele Besomi: Colin Clark
• QEH working paper on Colin Clark

There is a photograph at

• Colin Clark

References