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