News Media Services Yellow Monday Events Hans W. Singer 29 November 1910 – 26 February 2006 An obituary by Richard Jolly With the death of Sir Hans Singer – Hans to all of us in IDS and many beyond - the IDS has lost its brightest star and the world has lost one of its most eminent development economists. Hans's professional career lasted for 70 years, from 1936 when he received his doctorate under Keynes in Cambridge, to November last year when he gave what was to be his last lecture to IDS MPhil students, a week short of his ninety-fifth birthday. He was eating and joking and talking development with friends and students until the last week before his death. He died peacefully in his sleep on Sunday 26 February. No economist of the twentieth century was as persistent in focusing on the problems of developing countries and none so creative and indefatigable in exploring what could be done to accelerate their development. Hans was better known in developing countries than any other development economist of his era. His extraordinary vision and energy issued from a man small in size, of modest appearance and mild-mannered stance, head often cocked to one side, bushy eyebrows with twinkling eyes and a friendly but questioning smile. He was loved by many and deservedly and widely feted for his visionary and creative thinking, which was bold and innovative, positive and practical in contrast to his unassuming style and total disregard for outward appearances. It is difficult to believe that Hans was nearly 60 and retiring from the UN in 1969 when he returned to IDS as one of the first research Fellows. But once here, his prodigious output continued, except he could now publish in his own name, not anonymously under a UN institutional label. In his biography published in 2002, John Shaw lists Hans's lifetime output: 107 books, 83 major reports, over 260 professional articles, and an almost uncountable number of book reviews, letters to the press and other pieces. Undoubtedly, Hans's best-known work relates to the declining terms of trade experienced by developing countries. Generally referred to as the Prebisch-Singer thesis, we now know that the original analysis underlying this important work ought to be attributed to Hans himself, as argued in a recent book by John Shaw and Richard Toye. The thesis, first published in 1949, tracked the long-term decline in the terms of trade between developing and developed countries and analysed the underlying causes. After gaining his PhD, Hans worked on unemployment in Britain, living with unemployed families to get a first hand feel for their problems, and identifying the loss of dignity and morale as serious a problem as the loss of income to the unemployed. Today this is called the problems of social exclusion. Hans made many other fundamental contributions to development thinking. In the 1950s, when he was secretary to the committee which recommended the creation of a UN Fund for Economic Development, Hans did much of the technical work on the proposal to create a soft-loan facility for poor developing countries. Hans fashioned many of the ideas underlying food aid and the creation of the World Food Programme, which bestowed on him its Food for Life Award in 2001. Hans was one of the first economists to work in the Economic Commission for Africa – where I met him in 1963, Hans already distinguished, myself a graduate student collecting data for a thesis on African education. Later Hans served as the first Director of Research for UNIDO. For UNICEF, much earlier, Hans wrote the first document on children and economic development, which he thought so important that for several months he set aside his work on the terms of trade. When Hans joined the IDS, one of his first tasks was to help draft the Sussex Manifesto: Science and Technology to Developing Countries during the Second Development Decade, issued jointly with SPRU. Hans also revisited his theory of declining terms of trade, to give more attention to the part played by technological advance in developed countries. Hans also was appointed as one of the two main advisers to the World Employment Programme of the International Labour Office, which led to IDS being heavily engaged in studies of employment and employment policy in Colombia, Sri Lanka and Kenya. I was fortunate in 1972 to be co-leader with Hans of the mission to Kenya, which produced the ILO Kenya Report, Employment, Incomes and Equality. Hans on this mission originated the concept of redistribution from growth, which later became the theme for a seminal World Bank – IDS study, Redistribution with Growth. The Kenya report was also the first international document to draw attention to the positive contributions of the informal sector and it laid the foundation for 'basic needs strategy' which for a few years became fashionable orthodoxy after the World Employment Conference in 1976. Scarce wonder that the Kenya Report became a bible of development thinking in the 1970s and beyond. It also helped bring IDS to world attention. Hans was born in the German Rhineland in 1910. At the University of Bonn, his early brilliance brought him to the attention of the already world-renowned economist Josef Schumpeter. In 1933, when Hans had to flee Nazi Germany, Schumpeter wrote to Keynes in Cambridge This led to Hans becoming the fourth student to obtain his doctorate under Keynes' supervision. Notwithstanding these high-level contacts and the circumstances of his fleeing Germany, Hans was interned for about six weeks in the early months of the Second World War, until released at the personal intervention of Keynes. These early experiences had a life-long impact on Hans's work and thinking. He often said he developed his deep sympathy for marginalised people in developing countries by these experiences – of growing up as a Jew in a Catholic area of Protestant Germany (a minority in a minority in a minority), and later coming to Britain as a refugee. Hans was married for 67 years to Ilse Plaut Singer- after an engagement which lasted 3 days! (They married, then fled to the UK). Ilse provided not only support but brought her own strong moral commitments and an incisive and independent perspective to their partnership. Ilse Singer, who died in 2001, was a lifelong supporter of the Women's League for Peace and Freedom as well as for many years holding the UK record for sales of UNICEF greeting cards. Throughout his time at IDS - and before that in the UN - Hans was known as someone who always found time for others – for students as for colleagues, even while maintaining his prodigious output and an almost unbelievable range of correspondence, especially with UN and former UN friends. He played chess with a number of Sussex friends, and in earlier life played the violin in amateur quartets and more recently enjoyed singing with Odile, his daughter in law. Hans was awarded six honorary degrees – by the universities of Santa Fe, Argentina, Glasgow, Innsbruck, Kent, the Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa, Portugal, and Sussex. He received an honorary Fellowship of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague in 1975 and was knighted in 1994 for 'services to economic issues'. From 1988-90, he was President of the UK Development Studies Association, which honoured him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. Hans W. Singer, born 29 November 1910, died 26 February 2006. Singer's obituary in The Times, 28 February 2006 Singer's obituary in The Guardian, 1 March 2006 Singer's obituary in The Financial Times, 4 March 2006 Singer's obituary in The Independent, 4 March 2006 Singer's obituary in The Telegraph, 6 March 2006 Funeral Arrangements The funeral arrangements for Hans Singer have now been confirmed by his family. The funeral service will take place at the Sussex University Meeting House at 10.30am on Wednesday 8 March followed by the burial at Woodvale Cemetery, and then a reception at IDS. All are welcome. The family have requested that there be no flowers. Donations may be made to a Hans Singer memorial fund for students at IDS. Please send cheques payable to IDS, for the attention of Diane Frazer-Smith. The Hans Singer Archive The Hans Singer archive, in the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) at IDS, houses his many books, journal articles and research reports plus a good deal of unpublished and manuscript material, arranged with the help of archivist Oliver Pierce and Sir Hans himself. http://blds.ids.ac.uk/blds/archive/singer.html The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of IDS as a whole. For further information on any aspect of the Institute's work, please contact ids@ids.ac.uk Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK Telephone: +44 (0) 1273 606261 Fax: +44 (0) 1273 621202/691647 © IDS 2002 CLICK HERE TO PRINT CLOSE WINDOW The Times February 28, 2006 Professor Sir Hans Singer November 29, 1910 - February 26, 2006 Expert on the economics of developing countries, esteemed for his contribution to reducing world poverty Singer: he helped to found half a dozen UN institutions, including the World Food Program PROFESSOR Sir Hans Singer was Britain’s most highlyrespected authority on the economics of developing countries, a field he helped to pioneer, and to which he made innumerable theoretical and practical contributions. From early work on the economics of poverty in 1930s Britain, his professional trajectory led him to the UN, where he helped to establish the Department of Economic Affairs in 1947, and then on to five decades of research, policy advice and practical action all across the developing world. Singer will be remembered with affection and respect in academic institutions and in the corridors and assemblies of UN bodies, but also by the politicians and planners of the many countries where his wisdom contributed to the reduction of poverty and the achievement of a better life. An asylum-seeker in his early days, he fled Germany in 1933; studied in John Maynard Keynes’s circle at Cambridge; carried out pioneering research on poverty in the UK before the war; and then embarked on a 50-year commitment to developing countries, first with the UN and later from a base at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. His last book, a review with Kunibert Raffer of six decades of unequal development, was published in 2001, when he was 91. Hans Wolfgang Singer was born in 1910 in what is now Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia, the son of a doctor. Destined to be a doctor himself, he enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1929. However, he was won over to economics by the lectures of Joseph Schumpeter and by the influence of the trade economist Arthur Spiethoff. Just as a research career was opening up, however, the Nazis came to power. Singer was forced to flee, first to Switzerland, then to Istanbul, where he thought of opening an academic bookshop. His stay was short, however. On the recommendation of Schumpeter, Singer was offered a scholarship at Cambridge and the opportunity to continue his studies with Keynes. By 1934 he was married and installed at King’s, embarking on a lifetime’s loyalty to, and fascination with, Keynes and Keynesian ideas. Singer will be remembered best for his contribution to the theory of development economics, of which he was a pioneer — identified as such in a noted volume, Pioneers in Development, edited in 1984 by two others of that band, Gerald Meier and Dudley Seers. Singer’s most famous idea, developed in early work at the UN, is that the price of primary commodities inevitably declines relative to that of manufactured goods. This is to the long-term disadvantage of developing countries, which tend to specialise in the production of such commodities — as producers of coffee, among others, have found to their cost in recent years. Raul Prebisch, at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, developed similar ideas, and the Prebisch-Singer thesis, as it became known, has played a central part in development thinking for a generation, more especially as the empirical evidence in its support has strengthened. Singer made many other intellectual contributions. His early work on unemployment in the UK, carried out for the Pilgrim Trust, made points about social exclusion and the culture of poverty that would be familiar today. For that work he toured the country, observing — and also living side by side with — the poorest in the land. Over a 20-year period at the UN he contributed ideas about education and human capital formation, the importance of investing in children, and the case for international aid, including food aid. At IDS, from 1969 onwards, he added poverty and unemployment to this list, most notably in a famous 1972 study on unemployment in Kenya, which he led for the International Labour Organisation with Richard Jolly. He also wrote about the architecture of the international financial system, and was a notable critic of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Singer was firmly in the Keynesian tradition, a radical, a structuralist and often also, given the tenor of the times, a troublesome critic of the Establishment: indeed, he was revered by many as an original “dissenting economist”. He received six honorary doctorates and was the honorand of five festschrift volumes celebrating his work. In 2004, just before his 94th birthday, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Development Studies Association of the UK and Ireland, the professional body of which he himself had been president between 1988 and 1990. Like Keynes, Singer was as much interested in action as in theory. A picture of Keynes at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 hung outside his office at IDS, and he was committed throughout his life to multilateral organisations and principles. Many institutions can trace Singer’s involvement in their foundation or early development: among these are the UN Development Programme, the World Food Programme, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and the UN Research Institute for Social Development. His many writings — more than 100 books and 350 other publications, carefully catalogued by his biographer, John Shaw — constantly return to the practicalities of development. Hans Singer was knighted in 1994, just recognition of his service to his adopted country, as well as to the wider international community. His merits had been identified much earlier, however. His referees for citizenship in 1938 included Keynes, William Beveridge, Archbishop Temple and the vice-chancellor of Manchester University — “overkill,” Singer thought, although in the event his citizenship was not granted until 1946. When Singer was briefly interned in 1940, Keynes and Temple agitated for his release. It was good that they did: Singer contributed to the war effort by researching the German war economy from his base at the University of Manchester, and then served at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, working on urban land issues. He was at Glasgow University in 1947 when a request came from New York to help David Owen establish the Department of Economic Affairs at the newly created United Nations. Singer responded, somewhat reluctantly, and to his surprise found himself assigned to work on “(developing) country planning” — a topic on which he claimed no expertise, but which his new employers read off, erroneously, from his ministry experience. Never mind — 22 productive years followed. At 59 Singer returned to the UK, and to a fellowship at IDS, then recently established. He helped to build it into an institution recognised as a global powerhouse of thinking about development, leading research and action on the main debates over 40 years about the causes and remedies of poverty in the developing world. Singer’s own contributions ranged over poverty and unemployment, trade and finance, aid and social development. He was an inspired teacher, a tireless interlocutor, a tenacious advocate and a colleague much loved by researchers and students from many countries. Most started in awe of Singer’s history and reputation, but soon discovered a disarming gentleness, a twinkling sense of humour, and great generosity with time and ideas. Some even dared face him over the chess board. Singer was married for 67 years to Ilse, who died in 2001. A strong woman and a determined campaigner on her own account, she tolerated his all-embracing commitment to work as well as his domestic incapability. Singer is survived by his son, an elder son having predeceased him. Professor Sir Hans Singer, development economist, was born on November 29, 1910. He died on February 26, 2006, aged 95. Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions . Please read our Privacy Policy . To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website .