Colin Clark (1905–1989)

Alex Millmow

Chapter 16 in The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, 2021, pp 371-394 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract One prodigal Oxford economist overlooked for the Nobel Prize in Economics was surely Colin Clark. He made contributions in many fields, including national income accounting, development economics, public finance, transport economics, location economics, agricultural economics, the history of ideas and the economic consequences of population growth. Clark pursued these interests during the time he was Director of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute in Oxford. While his imaginative approach to estimating Britain’s national income in the 1930s was recognised by Keynes, it did not impress Whitehall officialdom. It may, apart from the attraction of Australia itself, have been a factor in Clark’s decision to take a high-level advisory job in Queensland. His brilliance as an economic statistician was to work with poor and obscure data yet still generate meaningful findings. However, this reputation was sullied in later years over the population growth debate as a result of Clark’s use of inadequate data and lack of statistical refinement. His standing among economists was further diminished by his relish for drawing unfashionable conclusions about public policy.

Keywords: National accounting; Increasing returns; Decentralisation; Econometrics; Development economics; Population growth; Papal Encyclical; Growthmanship; Tax-push inflation; Supply-side economics; Urban and regional economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_16

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