Alfred Maizels, 1917-2006
Alfred Maizels, who has
died aged 89, was one of
Britain’s most distinguished
economists who, in addition
to making major contributions
to the international literature
on trade and development,
was a formative
influence on the development
of the United Nations
Conference on Trade and
Development’s (UNCTAD)
approach to the problems of
developing countries. He was
held in great esteem not only
by his fellow economists but
also by policy makers and officials in the developing
world. The Indian Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan
Singh, spoke for many of them when he said
how “deeply saddened he was by the death of a
brilliant economist who had devoted his life to promoting
the development of poor countries”.
Maizels was born in Whitechapel, London, in
1917 the third child of a Jewish master tailor
who had emigrated from Poland before the First
World War. He went to Raine’s Foundation
School in Bethnal Green and from there to the
London School of Economics, graduating with
first class honours in 1937 and carrying off the
Farr Medal and Prize in Statistics as well. He
also met the sociologist Joan Sidey at LSE and
they married on May Day in 1942.
Maizels stayed on at LSE for two years in the
Research Department as an assistant to both
Professor von Hayek and Evan Durbin, two brilliant
men at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
The contrast no doubt appealed to
Maizels’ tolerant nature and sense of humour
but there is no doubt that his sympathies were
with Durbin, and not least with Durbin’s 1945
riposte to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
In early 1941 Maizels joined Brian Reddaway
and Evan Durbin at the Board of Trade where,
in a remarkably short time, they designed the
clothing rationing scheme which, according to
A.J.P. Taylor, was the most successful of all the
rationing systems and a striking instance of how
welfare considerations could be upheld despite
the privations of wartime. Maizels recalled that
they had been given a head-start by British Intelligence
who had got hold of a copy of the German
rationing plan: “it was not bad but we thought
we could do a lot better!”
In 1950 he was seconded to the fledgling United
Nations Economic Commission for Europe
(UNECE) in Geneva where Gunnar Myrdal had
attracted a galaxy of economists from all over
Europe and the United States. Maizels’ task was
to take over from W.W. Rostow a major study of
the European timber and industry, then a crucial
sector in the European recovery programme.
His careful analysis of the supply and
demand for timber was an outstanding piece of
work that laid the basis for effectual cooperation
among timber producers that continues to this
day. It had all the qualities that would characterise
all of his work: a clear analytical framework
setting out the nature of the problem and
why it mattered, a meticulous attention to digging
out the facts and getting them right, and a
pragmatic approach to policy recommendations
which paid attention to the politically feasible.
Returning to London Maizels found the Board
of Trade worrying (yet again) about the possible
impact of industrialisation in the developing
(then largely colonial) world on Britain’s own
position in the world economy. This led to his
secondment to the National Institute of Economic
and Social Research in London and to his
magisterial Industrial Growth and World Trade
(1963), a detailed, empirical and historical analysis
of the changing structure of world trade in
industrial goods in response to industrialisation
and rising per capita incomes. On balance the
conclusion was optimistic in that he showed that
the industrialisation of primary producing countries
was generally accompanied by an expansion
of imports of manufactures from the developed
countries, but he stressed that the relationship
was a complex, interactive one in which
macro-economic policies as well as technology
and a range of other factors played a crucial
role. Whether a developed country’s industries
would suffer from increased imports of manufactures
from the South would depend on their
adaptability and whether the country was
already caught in a vicious circle of slow growth
and declining competitiveness; and whether a
developing country could trigger a virtuous circle
of trade and growth would depend on a much
wider range of factors and policies than simple
trade liberalisation. Maizels was never one to be
beguiled by short cuts and quick fixes. Still quoted
by economic historians and specialists in
trade and development, it contains much that is
relevant to current debates about globalisation.
Maizels stayed on at the NIESR where his second
book, Exports and Economic Growth of
Developing Countries, appeared in 1968 to highly
complimentary reviews but by then he had
left for Geneva where Raúl Prebisch had
persuaded him to join the newly created
(UNCTAD).
Maizels crafted UNCTAD’S basic approach to
commodity policy and developed the idea of a
central or Common Fund for stabilising commodity
prices, a proposal that was close to
Keynes’ 1942 Plan for the International Regulation
of Commodities, although, like most economists,
he was unaware of the similarity as
Keynes’ proposal was only re-discovered in 1973.
Maizels had published in the 1968 American
Economic Review a powerful attack on the neoliberal
view that commodity price fluctuations
did not have harmful effects on the economic
growth of developing countries. He showed, in
detail, that they were very damaging and he
argued that government intervention in the commodity
markets was both possible and desirable
if developing countries were to diversify their
economies and trigger a process of sustained
growth.
The Common Fund was UNCTAD’s flagship
project for the New International Economic
Order which ultimately proved unsuccessful,
largely because the western industrial countries
were unwilling to contemplate measures that
might raise commodity prices and, more generally,
because they were increasingly reluctant
on ideological grounds to “buck the market”.
Maizels had few illusions about how the NIEO
and Common Fund proposals would eventually
turn out. Professor Gerry Helleiner recalls him
saying that, in the end, the objections of the
OECD countries to the NIEO proposals (and
UNCTAD analyses) were not really intellectual;
rather they reflected their deep fear of losing
their power to shape the global economy, something
they would never willingly relinquish.
Needless to say, his instincts proved accurate.
Maizels was Director of Economic Policy
Evaluation and Coordination in UNCTAD
between 1974 and his retirement in 1980. He
drafted virtually all the Secretary General’s
speeches in this period and his insistence on
solid argument and empirical evidence influenced
the work of every division in the organisation.
His firm belief in the importance of evidence-based policy proposals was reflected in
his active promotion of sound economic
research, both within UNCTAD and elsewhere,
on the whole range of problems facing the developing
countries in their efforts to participate in
the world economy. He invited distinguished
outsiders, by no means all of them sympathetic
to UNCTAD’s views, to criticise UNCTAD
research and suggest new and alternative
approaches. He also sought to bring economic
research institutions in developing countries
together, both to trade experiences with one
another and to enrich UNCTAD’s own work.
Maizels retired from the United Nations in
1980 but promptly took up a succession of
research fellowships at University College, London,
the UN World Institute for Development
Economic Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, and at
Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. In 2004 he was
appointed Professorial Research Fellow at the
School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
In these years he published some twentyfive
papers and two books, one of them, Commodities
in Crisis (1992) reflecting decades of
thinking about commodity problems and
regarded by many as the definitive work on the
subject. He also did some ground-breaking work
on the terms of trade of labour-intensive manufactured
goods, finding similar trends to those
that Prebisch and Singer had observed for primary
commodities, and was one of the first to
warn of the dangers for developing countries of
excessive competition and consequent income
losses in such markets, dangers that were amplified
by the persistent protectionism of the developed
countries.
Alfred Maizels was a man of extremely modest
demeanour, but he was held in enormous
respect by his professional colleagues. Ministers
and diplomats from developing countries
admired him for his integrity and his judgement,
and they recognised that his work was always
ultimately driven by a concern for social justice
and a deep compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged.
They trusted him – and that was
why he was a very influential member of the UN
secretariat.
He will be remembered not only as a fine
scholar and an outstanding international civil
servant but also as a greatly admired and muchloved
human being. He was unfailingly kind and
courteous to his colleagues and everyone he
met. Young economists, with much to learn, held
him in especially high regard. He possessed that
rare and precious gift that Charles Dickens once
described as “the ability to see the world clearly
with kind eyes”.
He is survived by his wife Joan, his three children,
five grandchildren, two great grandchildren,
and his younger sister.
By Paul Rayment, (Former Director of Economic
Analysis, UNECE. With thanks to
Dr. Yilmaz Akyüz and Professor Gerry Helleiner
for their helpful suggestions).
© 2006 UN Special |