Meade, James Edward

Meade, James Edward, 1907–95, British economist, studied at Oxford and Cambridge. Strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes, Meade worked at the League of Nations (1937–40) and was chief economist (1945–47) in Britain's first Labour government before he accepted professorships at the London School of Economics (1947–57) and Cambridge Univ. (1957–68). An advocate of labor-capital partnership, he was an adviser to England's short-lived centrist Social Democratic party during the 1980s. He was known for his rigorous analyses of the ways that a government's policies on taxes, spending, and interest rates affect trade and the ways that trade policies, in turn, affect economic welfare. Meade's many books include The Theory of International Economic Policy (2 vol., 1951–55) and Principles of Political Economy (4 vol., 1965–76). His work on international trade earned him the 1977 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Bertil Ohlin.