Clark, Colin

Clark, Colin, 1905–89, British economist. A statistics professor at Cambridge Univ. (1931–37), he taught in Australia and Great Britain until 1952, serving as economic adviser to the governments of both nations. Widely noted for his groundbreaking work in economic statistics and national income estimates, Clark was also among the first economists to use gross national product rather than national income as the basis of his studies. His best known work is The Conditions of Economic Progress (1940, repr. 1982).

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Clark, Colin 

Born Nov. 2, 1905, in London. British economist and statistician.

Clark was graduated from Oxford University in 1931. From 1931 to 1937 he was an instructor in statistics at Cambridge and from 1938 to 1952 served as an adviser on economic questions to governments in Australia and a number of Southeast Asian countries. From 1953 to 1969, Clark headed the research institute on the economics of agriculture at Oxford.

Clark is best known for developing a technological variation of the theory of economic growth which maintains that reliance by bourgeois states on some appropriate economic policy, such as regulation of the activity of monopolies and nationalization of a number of sectors of the economy, can allegedly moderate the cyclical fluctuations in the capitalist economy. He also created the concept of a three-sector structure of the national economy which states that “natural” economic development passes through stages based on a definite correlation between agriculture, industry, and services. Clark uses antiscientific methods to criticize Soviet economic statistics.

WORKS

A Critique of Russian Statistics. London, 1939.
The Conditions of Economic Progress. London-New York, 1957.
The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture, 2nd ed. London-New York, 1966. (With M. R. Haswell.)
Population Growth and Land Use. London-New York, 1968.

L. G. SUPERFIN