Mentors andFriends
In his memoirs, Corden (2018: 102) singles out Harry Johnson as his second great mentor after James Meade and calls him his ‘Patron Saint'. Indeed, as we shall see below, Johnson was the key figure behind Corden going to Oxford.
There was a vintage crop of graduate students at LSE when Corden was there. He made several close friends whose subsequent work had an impact on his own research. In Corden (ibid.: 104-106), he singles out Kelvin Lancaster, Richard Lipsey and Tad Rybczynski. The famous Lipsey and Lancaster (1956-1957) paper on second-best theory had a major impact on Corden (see Corden 1974, 1997a). Rybczynski, as every student of international economics knows, gave his name to one of the canonical theorems of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model, and it has featured prominently in several of Corden's papers.
John Black became another invaluable friend. Corden met him through the Oxford-Cambridge-LSE seminar at a time when Black was a student at Nuffield College, Oxford. Black read many of Corden's writings while they were being drafted. In his memoirs, Corden credits Black with saving him from numerous errors (see Corden 2018: 103-104).
During this period, LSE attracted several outstanding students from abroad who later achieved renown in international economics. These students were drawn to the School by the possibility of working with Meade. They included Peter Kenen, Richard Cooper and Robert Mundell (a future Nobel Prize winner in Economics). All became close friends of Corden.
When his British Council scholarship expired, Corden joined the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) as a Research Fellow for two years. Together with Margaret Hemming, he published a theoretical paper on import controls as an instrument to influence the balance of payments (see Hemming and Corden 1958).
This paper, in turn, served as the genesis of a much more widely cited paper of Corden's via a diagram showing how countries could achieve internal and external balance through a combination of expenditure-switching and expenditure-reducing policies (see Corden 1960). The diagram in question was the Swan diagram with its so- called four zones of economic unhappiness, where the twin objectives of internal and external balance are not achieved (see Swan 1955). Corden also highlighted the fact that a similar diagram was developed by Salter (1959) which showed how an economy's production and consumption of traded and non-traded goods could vary in response to relative price changes.[178] Combining these two diagrams yields the Salter-Swan model of internal and external balance which has subsequently been much used to analyse numerous issues in international economics. Corden (1960) can rightly claim credit for popularising this model.During this period in London, Corden married his fiancee Dorothy (nee Martin) whom he had met in Melbourne and who had followed him to England. Dorothy was a wonderful person, charming and kind, a committed Anglophile and the perfect life companion for Max.
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