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Colin Grant Clark succeeded James Bristock Brigden as Government Statistician, Director of The Bureau of Industry and Financial Adviser to Treasury in 1938.
He was born in London in 1905 and educated at Dragon School, Winchester and Brasenose College, Oxford where he obtained a Master of Arts. He fell under the influence of the British economist John Maynard Keynes.
In Britain Clark published ‘Survey of London Life and Labour and Social Survey of Merseyside’. He was on the economic advisory council to the British Cabinet from 1930 to 1931 and then lectured at Cambridge in statistics.
In 1937 he was appointed visiting lecturer to the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Western Australia.
The Queensland Government appointed him from 1938 to 1952 in the positions of:
- Deputy Director (Queensland) of the Commonwealth Department of War organisation in Industry,
- Director of the Bureau of Industry and
- Financial Adviser to Queensland Government.
It is said that he hated red tape and placed his ‘economic genius at the disposal of Federal political bosses, greases wheels of industry, shows it how to save petrol, labour and materials and helps to keep harmony between labor and capital (Sunday Mail, 28 June 1942).
He returned to England where from 1953 to 1969 he was Director of the Institute for Research in Agricultural Economics at Oxford.
In 1969 he came back to Australia and was Director of the ‘Popularum Progressio’ at Monash University. From 1976 to 1977 he was part of the Centre for Policy Studies in London. He retired to Australia in 1978 but continued as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. He passed away in 1989 in Brisbane.
Clark is said to have established the State’s first economic accounts which went on to provide key economic information for the State. His economic analysis played an important role in the war and post war reconstruction periods for Queensland.
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