Colin Clark, one of the most fertile minds in 20th-century applied economics, was born in London. After graduating in chemistry at Oxford University in 1924, he worked as assistant to W.H. Beveridge, Allyn Young and A.M. Carr-Saunders, stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in the May 1929 general election, then joined the staff of the Economic Advisory Council, recently set up by Ramsay MacDonald, of which Keynes was a member. In 1931, rather than agree to write a protectionist manifesto for MacDonald, he accepted an appointment as lecturer in statistics at Cambridge, where he remained until, in 1937, he went to Melbourne University, initially as visiting lecturer. In Australia he occupied government posts, chiefly as economic adviser to the state government of Queensland, until 1952. After spells as visiting professor at the University of Chicago and as Director of the Oxford Institute of Agricultural Economics, he returned to Australia in 1968. He remained active as a research consultant at the University of Queensland.

In the first decade of an astonishingly prolific half-century of research and writing, Colin Clark established himself as one of the pioneers of national income estimates. He greatly improved existing estimates for the United Kingdom, and later for Australia and the Soviet Union, and in so doing made methodological contributions so fundamental that he has justly been described as co-author, with Simon Kuznets, of the ‘statistical revolution’ that accompanied the revolution in macroeconomics of the 1930s. He was the first to use the gross national product (GNP) and to present estimates in the framework of the main components of aggregate demand (C+I+G); he made some of the earliest estimates of Keynes’s multiplier and, in an article published in 1937, one of the first international comparisons of the purchasing power of national currencies and thus of real national product. These were carried further in his monumental Conditions of Economic Progress (1940), which was important chiefly because it signalled the revival of interest among the profession in secular economic growth and development but which also supplied the first substantial statistical evidence of the gulf in living standards between rich and poor countries (the ‘Gap’) and developed the thesis that, in the course of economic growth, the occupational structure shifts from primary to secondary and tertiary industries. During the Second World War, in The Economics of 1960 (1942), Clark made one of the first ambitious attempts at a macroeconomic model of the world economy.

Recognized also as one of the ‘Pioneers in Development’, Colin Clark made significant contributions to empirical study of the relations between food supply and population growth, the economics of irrigation and subsistence agriculture, of determinants of economic growth and of productivity in agriculture in developing countries. At the same time, he was a gadfly in the political economy of developed countries, arguing against growthmanship, against high taxation and against welfarism long before it became fashionable to do so.

See Also

Selected Works

  • 1932. The national income 1924–31. London: Macmillan.

  • 1937. National income and outlay. London: Macmillan.

  • 1939. A critique of Russian statistics. London: Macmillan.

  • 1940. Conditions of economic progress. London: Macmillan. Revised ed, 1957.

  • 1942. The economics of 1960. London: Macmillan.

  • 1961. Growthmanship. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

  • 1964 (With M.R. Haswell.). Economics of subsistence agriculture. London: Macmillan.

  • 1967. Population growth and land use. London: Macmillan. Revised ed, 1977.

  • 1982. Regional and urban location. St Lucia: University of Queensland.

  • 1984. Development economics: The early years. In Pioneers in development, ed. G.M. Meier and D. Seers. New York: Oxford University Press.