Norman Scott, CMG

P.B.W. Rayment

Norman Scott, Director of the International Trade Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) from 1975 to 1993, died in Geneva on March 10, a few weeks before his 71 birthday. Apart from a few years spent in Belgrade and as a research fellow and assistant lecturer in Glasgow in the second half of the 1950s, Scott’s entire career was devoted to the United Nations where he was one of the few UN staff members to rise from the junior professional grades to the rank of Director. In 1994 he was made a CMG (Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George), not for services to the British Government but as a mark of the latter’s recognition of his contribution to the work of the United Nations and to international economic co-operation.

Norman Bruce St.Clair Scott was born in Glasgow in 1933 but his roots were in Orkney for which he retained a deep affection all his life and to which he frequently returned for his summer holidays.

After schooling at Coatbridge Academy he went up to the University of Glasgow in 1950 where he studied economics and Slavic languages and graduated with first class honours. Glasgow was followed by a year at the University of Belgrade and then by two years working mainly for the Yugoslav Foreign Trade Research Institute. After three years in Belgrade he was fluent in Serbo-Croat, had laid the foundations of a deep and long-lasting knowledge of Yugoslavia and its people, and, most important of all, had met and married, in October 1955, Mirjana Mateovic who was with him when he died.

In 1958 Scott attracted the attention of the UNEC’s research division with a series of papers he contributed to Soviet Studies on Soviet and east European approaches to inter- national trade and economic integration. The research division of ECE at that time was still the only international centre of real expertise on the centrally-planned economies of the east and its leading lights in this area, especially Nita Watts and Michael Kaser – both of whom would later take up academic appointments in Oxford – were quick to spot Scott’s potential value to the ECE. His fluency in French, Russ- ian, Czech and Serbo-Croat – he would later acquire proficiency in Albanian – combined with his economics and knowledge of eastern Europe made him an ideal candidate for ECE.

However, because UK nationals were at the time over-represented in the UN secretariat, it was his fluency in writing English that actually enabled Scott to join ECE in 1959. Nita Watts had written to Professor Alec (A.K.) Cairn- cross in Glasgow that she was desperately looking for a good economist “capable of transforming rather bad drafts into readable English, and doing it without antagonising all his colleagues … To do this successfully he will need to be tough but not arrogant; he ought to be brave enough to argue on points of economic analysis as well as of exposition with his colleagues if he thinks they are either contradicting each other or perpetrating individual nonsense”. Scott met these requirements with flying colours and continued to do so throughout his career, and not least when later he would be encouraging and coaxing member governments to cooperate in removing technical obstacles to their mutual trade and improving co-operation in areas such as international standards and technology transfer.

Scott’ s linguistic, drafting and analytical abilities led to frequent requests from other UN departments to “borrow him” for short assignments. It was on one of these that he worked with Sidney Dell in preparing the Draft Final Act and Report of the first UNCTAD conference in 1964. Dell later wrote: “the anonymity of this sort of work has meant that relatively few people are aware of the immense contribution that Norman made. He prepared the first draft of the Preamble, which was a really superb piece of writing: I recall Don Raul [Prebisch] simply put the word ‘magnificent’ in the margins of the draft”. Although the wording was changed by the Drafting Committee, “not always for the better, I fear – most of Norman’ s essential ideas were maintained in the Preamble ultimately adopted by the Conference”. Coming from one of the most distinguished economists to have worked for the UN, that is praise indeed.

Despite the pressures from UN personnel over national quotas, Scott’s abilities were always recognised by those in charge of sub stantive work and they resisted his replace ment by someone less qualified but with a more suitable passport. He rose quickly through the UN’ s professional grades and after editing and contributing to ECE’s Economic Survey of Europe for some ten years, Janez Stanovnik made him deputy director of the newly created Trade and Technology Division in 1970 and then Director in 1975. Scott’s long experience of the UN and of the ways of member governments in their approaches to international co-operation helped him to become one of ECE’ s most effective directors. Much of the work of his division was highly technical but of considerable benefit to member countries. Under his leadership the ECE took a leading role in the 1980s and early 1990s in the facilitation of international trade procedures and especially in the development and diffusion of standards for electronic data interchange (more precisely, UN/EDIFACT or UN Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport). Commentators and others who dismiss the UN as just a talking shop are usually blithely unaware of the importance of such work in bodies such as ECE: the benefits of Edifact in reducing transaction costs in international trade are large enough (some $4 trillion according to one recent estimate) to compare with the results of the Uruguay Round – and they are achieved with much less friction and diplomatic drama.

Despite his increasing preoccupation with the banausic details of subjects such as trade facilitation and smoothing the processes of inter-governmental co-operation, Scott continued to keep abreast of the broader economic picture and maintained for many years his lectures on east-west economic relations at Geneva’s Graduate Institute of Advanced International Studies where he was an adjunct professor. When he was forced to retire by the UN’s ageist retirement rules at the age of 60 in 1993, he became Director of the Institute’s Diplomatic Training Programme that, under the aegis of the Swiss government, provides courses for young diplomats and officials from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Scott was a large man physically, a reflection no doubt of his Viking forebears, but it was the largeness and generosity of his spirit which left the greater impression on his colleagues and the government representatives who worked with him and frequently joined his circle of friends His openness, intelligence and perennial good humour were greatly appreciated by his younger colleagues for whom he was always a source of encouragement; but they were also the qualities that were appreciated by governments, struggling to reach a conclusion, and not least, by the Geneva press corps. He faced the diagnosis of inoperable cancer with stoicism and a certain wry humour – he remarked to a former colleague that he now appreciated more keenly the economist’s well-worn phrases about ‘downside risks and the uncertain out- look’. He died at his desk putting the finishing touches to what was to be his closing speech to his last group of graduating diplomat-students. He is survived by his wife, Mirjana, and by his children, Biljana and Donald.

Norman Bruce St. Clair Scott, CMG, economist and international civil servant, born in Glasgow April 13, 1933 ; died in Geneva, March 10, 2004.