Tag Archives: robert neild

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Trinity Colleagues Pay Tribute To Robert Neild, 1924-2018

Hashem Pesaran, Partha Dasgupta and Gregory Winter remember Robert Neild.

Dasgupta:

Robert Neild was the last surviving member of a triumvirate that shaped the intellectual climate of economics at Cambridge in the 1970s. That influence lasted for over two decades. Together with Brian Reddaway (Professor of Political Economy) and Wynne Godley (Director of the Department of Applied Economics), Robert encouraged an approach to economics that was in sharp contrast to the then growing attention given in the leading university departments of economics in the UK and USA to economic theory and econometrics. The latter approach drew on mathematical techniques not only because they enabled one to reach conclusions with clarity, but also because they allowed one to trace those conclusions to the underlying hypotheses and data on which the studies were based. In modern economics policy is often kept at a distance. In contrast, the approach that Robert favoured insisted on a tight and constant link between analysis and policy; so much so that the separation between analysis and policy was wafer-thin.

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A Short Biography Of Robert Neild

The Journal Of Institutional Economics has a short biography: From Cambridge Keynesian To Institutional Economist: The Unnoticed Contributions Of Robert Neild written by Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Francesca Gagliardi, and David Gindis, to be published in a forthcoming issue.

Robert Neild was a member of what was known as the “New Cambridge” school of economics, comprising of economists such as Nicholas Kaldor, Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps.

The biography however has little of Neild’s work in the Cambridge Economic Policy Group, CEPG.

Neild was close to Wynne Godley and Nicholas Kaldor as can be seen from a reading of the preface of Godley’s book Monetary Economics:

In 1970 I moved to Cambridge, where, with Francis Cripps, I founded the Cambridge Economic Policy Group (CEPG). I remember a damascene moment when, in early 1974 (after playing round with concepts devised in conversation with Nicky Kaldor and Robert Neild), I first apprehended the strategic importance of the accounting identity which says that, measured at current prices, the government’s budget deficit less the current account deficit is equal, by definition, to private saving net of investment. Having always thought of the balance of trade as something which could only be analysed in terms of income and price elasticities together with real output movements at home and abroad, it came as a shock to discover that if only one knows what the budget deficit and private net saving are, it follows from that information alone, without any qualification whatever, exactly what the balance of payments must be …

Image credit; Nationaal Archief

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