Introduction

At the time of writing, Anthony J. Venables (“Tony” hereafter) is still active as BP Professor of Economics at Oxford, Fellow of New College and Director of the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource-Rich Economies (OxCarre).

Tony hails from Newport, South Wales, now in industrial decline but a prosperous steel town in the 1950s and 1960s with maritime traditions dating back to the Romans. He was the scion of an upper-middle-class dynasty that had run a successful family business for a century from the 1870s to the 1970s. The founder, John Cashmore, had realised that the tidal reach of the River Usk was ideal for ship scrapping as large vessels could easily navigate upstream. By 1937, his firm had become a major employer in the area, han­dling iron and steel, dealing with new and rebuilt machinery, works disman­tling and ship-breaking. “Everything Iron and Steel” became its logo. Apart from its strong tidal waters, Newport had other advantages, from business

I am grateful to Tony Venables for useful materials and discussions, and to Isabella Fausti for outstanding research assistance.

G. I. P. Ottaviano (*)

Bocconi University, Bologna, Italy

e-mail: gianmarco.ottaviano@unibocconi.it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 689

R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_28

expertise in coal exporting to the spin-offs of maritime trade. The adoption of modern working practices and new technology in metal cutting also helped. The firm had several competitors in the UK, but only a few were of a compa­rable size. What Cashmore seems to have feared more was foreign competi­tion, describing ‘busy, keen and happy workers doing their best to retain in this country a business that is threatened and attacked by continental compe­tition’ (Cashmore quoted in Dyer 2011).

While Newport was declining, Tony’s mind was elsewhere. He went to boarding school in Bath, taking mathematics, history and economics as spe­cialisms. It was the late 1960s, so everybody Tony’s age thought they would change the world. Tony was no exception and remembers being really excited by the book written by Jagdish Bhagwati on the economics of underdeveloped countries (see Bhagwati 1966). In 1969, he was offered admission to Cambridge University when he was still only 16 but took it up when 18 after a “gap year” teaching in Botswana. Looking back, Tony is not sure that Newport influenced him much. However, as we will see, there are surprising coincidences between Tony’s home town, local family business and his research interests.

By 1974, Tony had been awarded his BA in Economics at Clare College, Cambridge, and was ready to start graduate studies at Oxford, where he first obtained his BPhil (now called MPhil) in Economics at St Antony’s College in 1976 and then his DPhil in Economics at Worcester College in 1984. There were two main influences during this period. The first was college life. Tony was at St Antony’s: nomen est omen, or rather simply the result of hav­ing ‘been advised while at Cambridge that Nuffield was too dull!’ (private correspondence). At that time, St Antony’s was an extremely lively place for political argument (and it seems good parties, too). The second influence was Hywel Jones, his main MPhil supervisor for core teaching. Jones was an excel­lent communicator, with whom Tony used to go drinking and talking eco­nomics one evening a week along with other young fellows, such as Nicholas Crafts and Robert Eastwood. Jones had just finished writing an introduction to modern theories of economic growth (see Jones 1976) and introduced Tony to the Oxford grandees James Mirrlees (Nobel Prize winner in 1996) and Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in 2001).

Mirrlees became the sole supervisor of Tony’s BPhil thesis on “The Impact of Technical Progress on Less Developed Economies: A Theoretical Reappraisal”, which remained unpublished and contained an application of optimal control methods. Of those days, Tony remembers how Mirrlees ‘set demanding standards and taught rigour' (private correspondence), while interactions with Stiglitz were more informal. Tony had an office opposite Stiglitz's in the Institute of Economics and Statistics, and it was Stiglitz who triggered Tony's early work on imperfect competition. In Tony's words: ‘Joe was of course inspirational in his unique way' (ibid.). Mirrlees and Stiglitz got Tony into economics: up to then, he had planned to become ‘Secretary General of the UN, not an academic' (ibid.). Nonetheless, according to Tony, he did not really learn to write academic papers until the year he spent at the University of British Columbia in 1982—1983. There he had rich interactions with Charles Blackorby, William Schworm, David Donaldson as well as with Margaret Slade and Ashok Kotwal. In particular, Tony spent quite some time trying to persuade Blackorby and Schworm that much of the complicated aggregation analysis they were working on at the time was just an application of factor price equalisation. He eventually managed to win them over, as shown by Blackorby et al. (1993).

In 1984, Tony was appointed Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a pan-European research network set up that year in the image of the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Ten years later, Tony would become Co-Director with Richard Baldwin of the CEPR's International Trade Programme, and eventually one of its Trustees in 2013. As for many a young scholar in Europe since 1984, Tony's involvement in the CEPR's activities at an early stage of his career was fundamental to him getting international exposure. Especially at that time, young faculty did not have research grants or developed networks of contacts.

Interactions within the CEPR had a strong positive influence on Tony's penchant for topical policy analysis. At the turn of the century, Tony's deep interest in policy-relevant issues and commitment to economic development motivated his appointments first as research manager in the World Bank's Development Research Group (DECRG) from 1998 to 1999 and then as Chief Economist in the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) from 2005 to 2008. His activity at the World Bank overlapped with his old mentor Stiglitz's momentous term as Senior Vice President for devel­opment policy and Chief Economist.

After DFID, it was time for Tony to return to Oxford, where he remains. It is at Oxford that the different threads of his research have been woven together in studies on natural resources and development patterns through an eclectic mix of trade, development, urban and resources economics, as well as new collaborations with Frederick van der Ploeg, the Research Director of OxCarre, and Paul Collier of the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE).

In what follows, I will discuss Tony's contributions to economics, organising them along three broad themes: international trade (Section 2), economic geography (Section 3) and economic development (Section 4). Section 5 will conclude.

2