Colin Grant Clark (2 November 1905 – 4 September 1989) was a British and Australian economist and statistician who worked in both the United Kingdom and Australia. He pioneered the use of
gross national product (GNP) as the basis for studying national economies.
In 1930 he was appointed a research assistant to the
National Economic Advisory Council newly convened by Prime Minister
Ramsay MacDonald. He resigned shortly after his appointment, after being asked to write a background memorandum to make a case for
protectionism. Despite this, he had sufficiently impressed one of the council members (
John Maynard Keynes) to secure an appointment as a lecturer in statistics at
Cambridge University.
Lecturer at Cambridge
At Cambridge, he was a lecturer in statistics from 1931 to 1938. There he also 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 John Maynard 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."[2]
Move to Australia
During a visit to Australia and
New Zealand in 1937 and 1938 he accepted a position with the
Queensland Government at the invitation of the premier
Forgan Smith.[3] At the time he wrote to
Keynes about his decision to stay in Australia. As he put it, the chance to advise the Queensland Premier on 'practically everything connected with economic matters' was 'too remarkable an opportunity to be missed for putting economics into practice'[4]
On 6 May 1938, he was appointed Government Statistician, Director of the Bureau of Industry, and Financial Advisor to the Queensland Treasury, and provided the State's first set of economic accounts in 1940. He also held the position of Deputy Director (Queensland) of the Commonwealth Department of War Organisation of Industry from 1942 to 1946. Clark resigned as Government Statistician on 28 February 1947 to become Under Secretary of the Queensland Department of Labour and Industry.[5]
Unusually for a public servant he continued his academic work, publishing numerous articles on economics and preparing his book Conditions of Economic Progress which was published in 1940.
Later years
In 1951 he took a secondment to the
Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, and then to the
University of Chicago (1952), before taking the Directorship of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute (AERI) 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.
He was on the Council of the Econometric Society from 1948 to 1952.[6]
Family
Clark married Marjorie Tattersall in 1935; they had eight sons and one daughter, who in turn produced a total of 50 grandchildren. His son
Gregory became an author and academic in Japan. His nephew is the cognitive psychologist and computer scientist
Geoffrey Hinton.
Marjorie's sister
Viva Tattersall was a stage actress and Hollywood movie star.
Death
Clark died in
Brisbane, Australia, on 4 September 1989.[7] He is buried together with his wife Marjorie at the
Mount Gravatt Cemetery in Brisbane (Section 3B).
In 1987 Clark was together with Professor
Trevor Swan the first recipient of the Distinguished Fellow awards, presented by The Economic Society of Australia.[9]
The Australasian Meeting of the
Econometric Society has a Colin Clark Lecture at its meetings.
A building at the University of Queensland is named for him, and it is reputed that a stone grotesque in the university's
Great Court was also made in his likeness (G19).[10]
Publications
Papers
"A System of Equations Explaining the United States Trade Cycle, 1921 to 1941", Econometrica, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1949), pp. 93–124
"The Economic Functions of a City in Relation to Its Size", Econometrica, Vol. 13, No. 2 (April 1945), pp. 97–113
"Theory of Economic Growth", Econometrica, Vol. 17, Supplement: Report of the Washington Meeting (July 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. (July 1949), pp. 255–272
"A Critique of Russian Statistics by Colin Clark", Economica, May 1941, NS 8, p. 212.
^Don Patinkin, "Keynes and Econometrics: On the Interaction between the Macroeconomic Revolutions of the Interwar Period", Econometrica, Vol. 44, No. 6 (November 1976), pp. 1091–1123.
^Clark named his second son Nicholas Forgan in recognition of Smith's offer.
^Kenwood, A.G. "Clark, Colin Grant (1905–1989)".
Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University – via Australian Dictionary of Biography.
^Peters, G. "Colin Clark (1905–89) Economist and Agricultural Economist", QEH Working Paper Series, Working Paper Number 69, April 2001.