Alec Cairncross

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Sir Alexander Kirkland "Alec" Cairncross KCMG (born February 11, 1911 in Lesmahagow , † October 21, 1998 in Oxford ) was a British economist and civil servant. He was u. a. Economic advisor to HM Treasury and Chancellor of the University of Glasgow .

Life

Cairncross was born in 1911 as the seventh of eight children of the textile merchant and ironmonger Alexander Kirkland Cairncross (1865-1947) and his wife Elizabeth Andrew Wishart, a teacher, in Scotland . From 1925 to 1928 he attended the renowned Hamilton Academy in Hamilton , South Lanarkshire .

He studied a. a. with Alec Lawrence Macfie at the University of Glasgow and with a fellowship a. a. with Dennis Robertson , John Maynard Keynes , Arthur Cecil Pigou , Richard Kahn , Joan Robinson , Austin Robinson and James Meade at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge . He was the first to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Economics Tripos in 1931 and a Ph.D. in 1935. ( Cantab. ). He completed his doctoral studies with the seminal work British Home and Foreign Investment, 1870–1913 (published 1953). In Cambridge he belonged to the Cambridge Circus under John Maynard Keynes. In 1935 he became a lecturer in economics at the University of Glasgow. He also taught at the Scottish Agricultural College . During this time (from 1938) he wrote the standard work of the 1950s and 1960s Introduction to Economics (1944), the sixth edition of which appeared in 1982.

Cairncross was a civil servant from 1940 to 1945 after the outbreak of World War II . He worked in the economic department of the Cabinet Office (together with Lionel Robbins , Ely Devons and James Meade ), on the Board of Trade (1941) and most recently in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, where he became program director . From 1945 to 1946 he was an economic adviser in Berlin and took part in the multinational negotiations on German reparations .

In 1946 he worked briefly for the London weekly magazine The Economist . From 1946 to 1949 he was economic advisor to the Board of Trade and from 1949 to 1950 director of the economic division of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OECC) in Paris. In 1950 he also worked with Per Jacobsson from the Bank for International Settlements on the German balance of payments problem. From 1951 to 1961 he held a professorship in applied economics at the University of Glasgow. There he founded the UK's first applied economics research division. He was also founding director of the World Bank's Economic Development Institute (EDI) in Washington, DC from 1954 to 1957. From 1957 to 1959 he was also a member of the Radcliffe Commission, which dealt with the monetary system.

From 1954 to 1961 he was the first editor of the Scottish Journal of Political Economy of the Scottish Economic Society . From 1962 he was vice president of the society and from 1969 to 1973 its president. Then he became honorary president. The Scottish Economic Society annually awards the 1,000 since his death in 1998 pounds doped Cairncross Prize for junior members.

From 1961 to 1964 he was economic advisor to the conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd and Reginald Maudling . From 1964 to 1969, when the Labor Party was in government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson , he was the founder and head of the UK Government Economic Service (GES). In 1967 he told a post at Keynes College of the University of Kent at, but was then 1969-1978 Master of St Peter's College of the University of Oxford . From 1968 to 1969 he served as President of the Royal Economic Society (RES), from 1970 to 1971 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (GPDST) and from 1972 to 1992 of the Girls' Public Day School Trust . From 1972 to 1996 he was a Chancellor at the University of Glasgow. During this time he wrote several books about his previous time in London, including an autobiography (published in 1999). He also held a business history seminar at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

Craincross recognized the growing importance of the People's Republic of China in the world economy and international relations early on . He was part of the British Academy's first delegation in China in the late 1970s . This cooperation resulted in an exchange program with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences . In the 1980s and 1990s, he advised the Chinese leadership on macroeconomic stability and market reforms. From 1985 to 1995 he was Chairman of the Administrative Committee of the Center for Modern Chinese Studies (CMCS) at the University of Oxford. He established the subject “Chinese Economics” and supervised numerous exchange students and scientists from China as part of the Economics Training Program (ETP), which was supported by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Ford Foundation . In 2007 the Cairncross Economic Research Foundation was established in Beijing .

He has published more than 50 academic articles and books with a focus on economics and poverty research.

family

Cairncross was married to Mary Frances Glynn (1919–1998) from 1943 (they had known each other since 1939) and had five children. His daughter Frances Cairncross (* 1944) is also an economist, currently working for the Institute for Fiscal Studies , and a former business journalist with the Economist ; the son Sandy Cairncross works as an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine . His brother John Cairncross (1913-1995) was a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring .

honors and awards

Orders and decorations:

Fellow :

  • 1961: British Academy (FBA)

Honorary Fellow:

Honorary doctorates :

Fonts (selection)

  • Introduction to Economics . Butterworth, London 1944. (together with Peter Sinclair, 6th edition, 1982, ISBN 0-408-71055-1 )
  • Home and Foreign Investment, 1870-1913. Studies in Capital Accumulation . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1953.
  • With Barry Eichengreen : Sterling in Decline. The Devaluations of 1931, 1949 and 1967 . Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1983, ISBN 1-4039-1305-6 .
  • Years of Recovery. British Economic Policy, 1945–51 . Methuen, London a. a. 1985, ISBN 0-416-37920-6 .
  • The Price of War. British Policy on German Reparations, 1941–1949 . Blackwell, New York et al. a. 1986, ISBN 0-631-14919-8 .
  • A country to play with. Level of Industry Negotiations in Berlin 1945–46 . Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross 1987, ISBN 0-86140-274-X .
  • With Nita Watts: The Economic Section, 1939–61. A Study in Economic Advising . Routledge, London 1989, ISBN 0-415-03173-7 .
  • Planning in waiting time. Aircraft Production in Britain, Germany, and the USA . St. Martin's Press, New York 1991, ISBN 0-312-05346-0 .
  • With Kathleen Burk: Goodbye, Great Britain. The 1976 IMF Crisis . Yale University Press, New Haven et al. a. 1992, ISBN 0-300-05728-8 .
  • Managing the British Economy in the 1960s. A Treasury Perspective . Macmillian, London et al. a. 1996, ISBN 0-333-65075-1 .
  • Living with the Century . With a foreword by Roy Jenkins . iynx, Aberdeen 1999, ISBN 0-9535413-0-4 .

literature

Obituaries :

Web links

Databases and Archives:

Biography:

Honors:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deceased Fellow ( August 8, 2014 memento in the Internet Archive ), British Academy, accessed August 5, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Cairncross, Alec
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cairncross, Alexander Kirkland (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economist and civil servant
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Lesmahagow
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1998
Place of death Oxford