Colin Clark
Colin Clark is the next important econometrician at Oxford. Clark compiled the first modern set of national income accounts (NIAs) for the UK and pursued data collection on a worldwide scale.
He was born in London and studied chemistry at Brasenose College (1924-1928), Petty’s old college, where he became a Fellow for a time, and later was Director of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford. His hero was indeed Petty, and like Petty, he started academically as a scientist so was self-taught in economics, with a similar creative imagination, also displaying brilliance and originality from an early age. Clark was first appointed Lecturer in Statistics at the University of Cambridge in 1931, before moving to Australia, where he spent a year at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, then as Director of the Queensland Bureau of Industry and as the Queensland Government Statistician between 1938 and 1953 before he returned to England, but settled permanently in Australia from 1978.His Herculean data collection efforts in the 1930s remain unparalleled to the modern day. He was inspired by Bowley (1895, 1913), and built on key contributions by Marshall (1890), who had considered an aggregate idea of national income, leading to the modern measure of gross domestic product (GDP). Alfred Flux (1924, 1929) was another precursor who, with Bowley, pioneered the Census of Production to create a measure from the supply side as well as estimating the national income, as was Stamp (1916) (see Tily 2009). Tily as well as Millmow (2019) and Chapter 16 of the current volume provide excellent discussions of Clark’s major contributions to the development of national income accounts, and as Tily remarks: ‘The breadth and depth of Colin Clark’s work in the 1930s-funded from his own resources, it should be added—marked him out as the most resourceful and innovative National Accountant of them all’ (Tily 2009: 356). (See Darnell (2018) for more detail on Bowley.)
Clark is credited with inventing the concept of “gross national product” before Kuznets (1946) invented GDP, and later was influential in setting up the national accounts for Australia. He produced many journal papers and books, including The National Income, 1924-1931, published in 1932 (Clark 1932), and National Income and Outlay, in 1937 (Clark 1937). Clark also developed a system of equations explaining the US trade cycle during the period 1921—1941 (Clark 1949), an embryonic macroeconomic model and contributed to development studies (see Maddison 2004).
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