ARTHUR FERGUSON EWING, 1915–2007

Arthur Ewing, a long-serving, devoted and distinguished member of the UN secretariat, died last October just a few weeks short of his 93rd birthday. He served successively with the UN’s Regional Commissions for Europe and Africa, and with the UNDP in Cambodia. After retiring in 1975 he was a regular consultant to UNCTAD.

PAUL RAYMENT, (FORMERLY DIRECTOR OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS, UNECE)

Ewing was born in October 1915 in Bradford, England. His parents were Scottish and during his childhood there were frequent visits to relations in Edinburgh and Glasgow. His credentials as a Yorkshireman, however, were confirmed by his lifelong enthusiasm for the game of cricket. He was educated at Oundle School and The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he studied natural sciences, obtaining his degree in physiology in 1937. He had originally intended to be a doctor but on leaving Oxford he decided to try for the British Civil Service. After studying economics at the London School of Economics as an occasional student he passed the competitive entry examination and in September 1939 entered the Ministry of Supply as an Assistant Principal.

Rejected for military service on health grounds, Ewing spent the war years working in a number of strategically important areas dealing with the supply of raw materials needed for war production and with the government’s building programme which included military installations. In these difficult times he accumulated a great deal of practical knowledge and experience that would eventually shape his future career with the United Nations.

Ewing’s political views at this time were on the far left of the political spectrum and, although never a card-carrying member, he admitted to being a “fellow traveller” of the British Communist Party. Likemany of his generation and social class, he was appalled by the high levels of unemployment of the 1930s and looked for alternative arrangements to avoid the failures of inter-war capitalism. As a young civil servant with Marxist ideas working in a bureaucracy controlling the wartime economy, the idea of economic planning in the post-war world did not appear far-fetched. But, as formany of his fellow travellers, post-war developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and his own experience of government intervention in the economy led to disillusion and his views swung to the political right and neo-liberal economics.

Ewing’s expertise in raw materials and building programmes was in great demand after the war and this led him towards the UN. In 1948 he was a member of the UK delegation to a meeting on housing called by the Emergency Economic Committee for Europe (EECE). This was one of the three inter-governmental bodies created by the USA and the UK to tackle the immediate post-war problems of economic dislocation and to get reconstruction moving; the other two dealt with coal supplies and inland transport. All three committees were absorbed by the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe which had been founded in March 1947 with Gunnar Myrdal as its first Executive Secretary. Ewing was invited to join the new UN body and in January 1949 he started work as Deputy Director of ECE’s Industry and Materials Division. He had initially come to Geneva for just one year, but stayed for twelve – a not uncommon experience.

The late 1940s and early 1950s were crucial years in the evolution of the UNECE and for the realisation of Myrdal’s vision of it as a two-track organisation: that is, one track devoted to research, policy analysis and the development of statistics, the other focused on supporting intergovernmental cooperation and concerted action on matters of urgent, mutual interest. UNECE’s research track was largely in the hands of the Research and Planning Division under Nicholas Kaldor but
Ewing played an important part in promoting both tracks in the areas under his responsibility, especially when he was made Director of an Expanded Industry Division in 1952.

Various committees focused on the problems of increasing the supply of scarce raw materials (coking coal, steel, timber, etc) and reopening East-West trade, while on the research track there was a stream of influential studies ranging from the European and global steel markets, through rent control to the price of oil and the supply of timber. These studies strengthened and influenced the direction of the work of the intergovernmental committees but their quality – the authors included high calibre economists such as Jack Downie, W.W.Rostow and Alfred Maizels – often ensured a much wider influence and, sometimes, strong opposition when they trod on the toes of vested interests such as those of the major oil companies.

By the end of the 1960s Ewing was ready for a change and he jumped at an offer to join the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) where he was asked to set up, virtually from scratch, a newDivision of Industry, Transport and Natural Resources, a task for which he was highly qualified given his experience of the previous twenty-two years. But matters turned out to be more problematic than he anticipated and he was always disappointed that he had never been able to achieve what he had hoped to do in ECA. His work in setting up the new division was interrupted by his having to be officer-in-charge of the Commission for a year while waiting for the new Executive Secretary, Robert Gardiner, to arrive and then by his subsequent role as special adviser to him. He considered the low point of his career to have been the eighteen months he spent as ECA’s special representative in Kinshasa, where he had little to do and little opportunity to contribute to building the ECA secretariat.

There were various reasons for this disappointment: the difficult and complicated political context in which ECA had to operate, clashes of personality and sensitivities, for example, but Ewing also argued that a key factor was that ECA, and indeed most other UN departments, never had the strong and effective leadership that ECE had had under Gunnar Myrdal or the Economic Commission for Latin America under Raúl Prebisch. In the spring of 1968 he was offered the chance to move into technical assistance, something he had always wanted to do. He went to Cambodia with UNDP and his first task was to coordinate the Prek Thnot power and irrigation project. This proved to be a great success with a highly respectable costbenefit ratio. A key factor in its success was that UNDP aid and, as a result of Ewing’s persuasive discussions with local embassies, also that of individual donor countries, was integrated with the Cambodian government’s own programme rather than being distributed according to the particular interests of the donors. Altogether, Ewing spent some four and a half productive years in Cambodia, eventually becoming the Resident Representative of UNDP.

Ewing left Cambodia at the end of 1973 and took early retirement from the UN. At least, he retired as a full-time staff member because for the next five years or so he was a regular consultant to UNCTAD’s Trade and Technology Division – then headed by Surendra Patel, an old friend and colleague from ECA days – where he advised on technical assistance and helped to set up the Division’s Advisory Service.

Arthur Ewing liked to write about his professional experiences and his publications include two books on Africa (published by Oxford University Press), several papers in the Journal of Modern African Studies, and a number of articles on investment and technology transfer in the Journal ofWorld Trade Law. In retirement he embarked on a series of five short books, published between 1992 and 2006, in which he reflected on his career and his various intellectual interests, discussed the various institutions in which he had worked, and generally provided a running commentary on current affairs. In these texts the young Marxist of the 1940s had become a strong admirer of Mrs Thatcher and a thorough- going neo-liberal in matters of economic policy. Nevertheless, his experience told and unlike many of the market fundamentalists
of the early 1990s he always recognised the crucial importance of sound institutions for creating the necessary framework for markets to function efficiently.

Ewing had a sharp pen when he was writing about the UN, especially when castigating the deficiencies of its seniormanagement, but he never abandoned his belief that the organisation mattered and that governments, however much he doubted their competence and probity, had to engage intelligently with one another and create structures of cooperation
that would help them to avoid violent conflict and to enable millions of people in the developing countries to escape from poverty. He continued to follow developments in the UN very closely and although he was often very critical he was also quick to praise those members of the secretariat, especially the younger ones, who he thought were doing excellent work.

Arthur Ewing was an elegant, kind and courteous man who made and kept many friends throughout a long career. He is survived by his wife Martine, his stepdaughter, Michaela, and his children, David, Richard, Sally-Ann, Jane and Andrea.