William Brian Reddaway, CBE, FBA (8 January 1913 – 23 July 2002) was an English economist and academic.

Biography

Born on 8 January 1913, he was the son of the historian William Fiddian Reddaway, who was a fellow of King's College, Cambridge.[1] He attended King's College School, Cambridge, Lydgate House in Hunstanton, and Oundle School before matriculating at King's College, Cambridge, in 1931, with a scholarship. He read mathematics and was placed in the first class for part 1 of the Tripos,[2] before switching to economics in which he came top in his year for part 2. He was taught by Richard Kahn, J. M. Keynes and Gerald Shove.[1]

After graduating in 1934,[1] he worked at the Bank of England, during which time he visited the Soviet Union and produced a book on its financial system.[2] In 1936, he was appointed to a research fellowship in economics at the University of Melbourne,[1] where he worked under L. F. Giblin. He gave evidence to the Commonwealth Arbitration Court in which he advocated for Australian miners' wages to be increased; when this was approved (as the 1937 Basic Wage Judgement), it was informally called the "Reddawage".[3][4]

Reddaway left the university in 1938 to take up a fellowship at Clare College, Cambridge, where he remained until 2002.[5] He was also appointed a lecturer in the University of Cambridge in 1939. He worked at the Board of Trade during the Second World War (where he developed clothes rationing and worked as a statistician), returning to his academic duties in 1947. He was director of the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge from 1955 to 1969. He was also promoted to a readership in 1957 and to the Professorship of Political Economy in 1969, in which chair he remained until he retired in 1980.[1]

Reddaway produced studies of government taxation and foreign direct investment policy during the 1960s and 1970s, while also studying development in a range of other countries.[1] He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1967, served as the co-editor of The Economic Journal from 1971 to 1976,[6] and was appointed a CBE in 1971 for his services as a member of the National Board for Prices and Incomes.[7]

Reddaway died on 23 July 2002; his wife Barbara Augusta, née Bennett (with whom he had four children), had died in 1996.[8]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 R. C. O. Matthews, "Reddaway, (William) Brian", The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed., Oxford University Press, 2008). Retrieved 1 April 2021.
  2. 1 2 Ajit Singh, "William Brian Reddaway, 1913–2002", Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 138 (2006), p. 288.
  3. ↑ Singh (2006), pp. 288–289.
  4. ↑ G. C. Harcourt, "Reddaway, [William] Brian (1913–2002)", in G. C. Harcourt (ed.), On Skidelsky's Keynes and Other Essays: Selected Essays of G. C. Harcourt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 296.
  5. ↑ Singh (2006), p. 285.
  6. ↑ Singh (2006), p. 300.
  7. ↑ Supplement to the London Gazette, 12 June 1971 (no. 45384), p. 5965.
  8. ↑ Singh (2006), pp. 289, 306.
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