Hans Wolfgang Singer, an economist who devoted his life to analyzing the causes and effects of poverty and helped create the World Food Program and the United Nations Development Program, died in his sleep on February 26 in Brighton, England. He was 95.
His death was announced by the University of Sussex, where he last worked.
Sir Hans, who was knighted in 1994, was best known for his work on the effects of trade on developing nations. He argued that long-term trade agreements favor developed countries, resulting in falling prices for commodities produced by poorer nations, an idea that came to be known as the Prebisch-Singer thesis.
He was born in 1910 in the Rhineland to a middle-class family. Originally he was to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a doctor. But he turned to economics instead, drawn by a desire to understand the forces behind Germanys great inflation of 1923 and depression of 1930 and 1931, according to his biographer, John Shaw.
As Nazi persecution of Jews increased, he fled Germany in 1933. He had been studying at Bonn University there, and he sought asylum in Britain. He became one of the Cambridge Ph.D students of the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Like Keynes, Sir Hans ‘treated economics as a moral science,’ noted A. P. Thirlwall, professor of applied economics at the University of Kent in Canterbury. For a study of poverty in Britain, Sir Hans lived with unemployed families and theorized that the loss of dignity that went with lack of work was as serious a problem as unemployment itself.
In 1947, he joined the United Nations from Glasgow University, where he began studying the theories on trade and developing nations that earned him renown in economic circles. He spent 22 years at the United Nations, advocating changes to the treatment of developing nations, like giving aid in the form of food.
After retiring from the United Nations, he took a fellowship at the Institute for Development Studies in Sussex University, where he published 30 books.
Sir Hans was married to Ilse Lina Plaut, a feminist and fund-raiser, for 67 years until her death in 2001. He is survived by a son.
Kilde: The Push Journal
