Raymond Glasgow, 1940-2002

Raymond Glasgow, former staff member of UNCTAD, died unexpectedly in February 2002 to the shock and grief of his many friends and ex-colleagues.

Raymond was born in Guyana on 23 June 1940. He was the third of five children of Marjorie and the late Lionel Glasgow. In Guyana he had a sound basic education which brought out the scholar in him. The culmination of this was at the élite Queens College in Georgetown where his major concentration was in mathematics and natural sciences. After leaving school Raymond became a management trainee at the commodities conglomerate, Booker McConnell, where he worked for some years in Guyana. His subsequent career with the firm took him to England where he followed his interest in economics through evening classes. Enamoured of Switzerland after a visit to the country, he enrolled as a student in the Hautes Études Internationales (HEI). Before completing his diploma he found a job in the shipping division of UNCTAD with the famous shipping economist, Stanley Sturmey. This seems to have been a fruitful collaboration since Sturmey instilled in Raymond not only an interest in shipping but also in the economics of services more generally and in international trade statistics. Eventually Raymond transferred to UNCTAD’s statistical unit where he worked under Aziz Taj and his abilities were so appreciated that in spite of his formal rank of research and statistical assistant he represented UNCTAD at meetings of statisticians in other international organizations. After the retirement of Aziz Taj Raymond’s institutional memory and his contibution through wise advice and in other ways to the attempts to restructure the statistical unit’s work played a major role in ensuring that the difficult period before the appointment as chief of a new senior statistician was successfully bridged.

Throughout his UNCTAD career and subsequently Raymond continued to broaden and deepen his intellectual interests amongst which methodology and the history of economic thought assumed an increasingly important part. True to his personality Raymond was a great believer in methodological pluralism, and he used to express the hope that the approach to economic methodology of one his intellectual heroes, Wesley Mitchell, founder Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States and giant in the history of applied economics, would eventually prevail over the narrower perspectives which now mostly dominate the discipline. His intellectual interests also comprised non-economic subjects such as international politics and diplomacy (areas included in his studies at HEI to which his career at the United Nations provided further exposure). While still at UNCTAD, he authored or coauthored a number of published and unpublished articles, and he had planned further work of this kind for his retirement.

Raymond was the brother of an Olympic sprinter and himself a fine athlete and under-20 national champion in the 400 metres. He loved outdoor activities. He was an accomplished tennis player (serving as instructor to several of his friends), did some skiing, and enjoyed long country walks. He also was an avid

and accomplished pianist and had progressed to writing lyrics and putting them to music. He was modest about his compositions but happy to share them with friends who could appreciate them.

Raymond was a compassionate, loyal and tolerant person, and extraordinarily well liked within the UNCTAD secretariat. He accepted people as they were and was never judgemental, possessing as he did a subtle sense of the humorous side of people and events. He had a remarkable capacity for developing highly individual relationships with different people based on particular shared interests and concerns. He would often come to my office and knock softly on the door. I could always recognize that knock and frequently the conversation which followed led to arranging a dinner at which we could extend our exchanges. I shall miss terribly those knocks, those dinners, and those conversations.

Andrew Cornford, Officer-in-Charge, Macroeconomic and Development Policies 
Branch, Division on Globalisation and Development Strategies, UNCTAD.