Introduction

This chapter gives an overview of Colin Clark’s life and career. His life was informed by three themes, his love of Australia and, before that, Britain; his Roman Catholicism; and his ideological odyssey from distributivism to radical conservatism. Despite taking the economics world by storm with a mercurial ability for statistical analysis, Clark’s work has been largely overlooked in the 30 years since his death. His career was punctuated by a number of firsts. He was the first economist to derive the concept of GNP, the first to broach development economics and to foresee the re-emergence of India and China within the global economy. In 1945 he predicted the rise and persistence of inflation when taxation levels exceeded 25% of GNP. And he was also the first economist to debunk post-war predictions of mass hunger by arguing that rapid population growth engendered economic development. A figure akin to an intellectual fountain, Clark wandered through applied economics in much the same way as he rambled through the English countryside and the Australian bush. His imaginative wanderings over the main fields of economics qualify him as the gypsy economist for the twentieth century.