Sauvy, Alfred (1898–1990)

Abstract

Sauvy was born 31 October 1898, in Villeneuve-de-la-Raho, France. He graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique, and is known as a demographer, economist, statistician and sociologist. He was an adviser to Jean Monnet and Paul Reynaud 1938–1940, a member of the Population Commission of the United Nations from 1947 to 1974, and he occupied a chair in social demography at the College of France from 1959 to 1969. He founded the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, one of the world’s leading centres of demographic research, which he directed from 1945 to 1962. He was president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population from 1961 to 1963. A prolific author, his works include 45 books and many articles, on a broad range of topics from French economic history since the First World War to the effect of technological change on employment and the history of thought in demography. But he is best known among demographers and economists for his two-volume treatise Théorie générale de la population (1966), published in English in 1969 as The General Theory of Population.