Colin Clark was born in London in 1905 and was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford. He then studied at Winchester College, then at Brasenose College Oxford where he graduated in Chemistry in 1928. After graduation he worked as a research assistant with William Beveridge at the London School of Economics (1928—29) and then with Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders and Allyn Young at the University of Liverpool (1929—30). During this time he ran unsuccessful campaigns for the British Labour Party in the parliamentary seat of North Dorset (1929), and later for Liverpool (1930) and Wavertree and South Norfolk (1935). In 1930 he was appointed a research assistant to the Economic Advisory Council newly convened by Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald. 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.
He was a lecturer in Statistics in Cambridge from 1931 to 1938 where he 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 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."
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 William Forgan Smith, who was generally known as Forgan Smith. 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'
On 6 May 1938, he was appointed Government Statistician, Director of the Bureau of Industry, and Financial Advisor to 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.
Unusually for a public servant he continued his academic work, publishing numerous articles in Economics and preparing his book "Conditions of Economic Progress" which was published in 1940.
In 1951 he took a secondment to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome (1951) and then to the University of Chicago (1952) before taking the Directorship of the Institute for Agricultural Economics 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.
Richard Stone, in his Nobel Prize Lecture, paid tribute to Clark's influence on his work:
"[...] the restoration of the synthetic vision of the political arithmeticians came in the 1930’s with the work of Colin Clark who in 1937, in his National Income and Outlay brought together estimates of income, output, consumers’ expenditure, government revenue and expenditure, capital formation, saving, foreign trade and the balance of payments. Although he did not set his figures in an accounting framework it is clear that they came fairly close to consistency. Clark was my teacher at Cambridge and his work was the main source of inspiration for mine."
He was on the Council of the Econometrics Society from 1948 to 1952.
In 1984 he was named by the World Bank as one of the
pioneers of development [1] along with Sir Arthur Lewis, Gunnar Myrdal, W.W. Rostow and Jan Tinbergen.
In 1987 Clark was together with Professor Trevor Swan the first recipient of the Distinguished Fellow awards, presented by The Economic Society of Australia.
Colin Clark is buried at the Mount Gravatt Cemetery in Brisbane, Australia.
He has 8 sons, 1 daughter and 40 grandchildren.
Colin Clark Memorial Lecture
Started in 1991, the Colin Clark Memorial Lecture is held annually "to recognise the contribution to economics made by Colin Clark whose work on national income accounting was fundamentally important to the development of macroeconomics and central to the approach of John Maynard Keynes that was so widely adopted after the Second World War." A list of those who have given the lecture can be found on the University of Queensland website [2]
The 19th Annual Colin Clark Memorial Lecture was given by Dr David Gruen, Executive Director, Macroeconomic Group, Australian Treasury and co-authored by one of Colin Clark's grandsons, Colin Clark, who is also with the Treasury. [3]
