Peter Bocock was a man whose name did not provide the raw material for headlines, but his influence was probably as great as many of those whose names are carved in the consciousness of the public. As an economist and strategist both at the World Bank and the highest level of British govenment, he laid the groundwork for policies that continue to affect how we are governed today.

Peter Wainwright Bocock was born in Bramhope, Yorkshire, in 1942, but moved to Canada with his family in 1954. He was educated at Charterhouse and Magdalen College, Oxford, taking a first in PPE.

In 1965 he joined the Conservative Research Department to prepare the Conservative Party to return to government. Bocock worked for Keith Joseph, Iain MacLeod and Enoch Powell.

He joined the World Bank in 1968 in the information department under the redoubtable William Clark: he arrived in Washington the week Martin Luther King was assassinated, when there were riots in the streets and a general curfew.

He worked as a speechwriter for the bank's president, Robert McNamara, and was part of the bank's press relations operation. Later he became the bank's youngest division chief and represented the bank at conferences around the world.

In 1971 Edward Heath, by then Prime Minister, brought Bocock back to London to work in the Central Policy Review Staff, set up in Downing Street under a former head of research at Shell Oil, Victor Rothschild. The “Think Tank”, as it was known, was another gathering of brilliant young people, established on the top floor of the Cabinet Office at No 11. Their brief was to take the long view of the Government's policies and to monitor its achievements, and also to look at everything the civil service prepared for the Cabinet.

This was the gadfly role. The Think Tank would conduct in-depth reviews of government policies, and submit one or two-page memos to append to papers that Cabinet ministers submitted to the Cabinet, analysing and commenting on them. Ministers and civil servants hated it.

Bocock wrote many of these memos, and was rewarded by the occasional trip to Chequers to brief ministers in those bucolic surroundings. Heath once entertained his guests, including Bocock and his wife, by importing from Balliol a production of The Frogs by Aristophanes.

However, Rothschild's dominant personality could crush members of his team unless they defended their wavelengths vigorously. Bocock was too nice for that environment, and returned to Washington and the World Bank in 1974.

He became loan officer for Eastern Africa, and in the late 1980s joined the Population and Human Resources Division for the Middle East. There he designed bank programmes for educational and economic development, particularly in Jordan. Later he worked as a senior economist in a variety of bank projects.

During the 1990s he joined the Office of the Chief Economist of Middle East Departments, playing a notable role in preparing the bank's policies to advance the Middle East peace process, in the aftermath of the Oslo Agreements.

His work here was in many ways the bank's first effort to articulate how the economy of the Middle East would respond and need to change if peace became permanent.

In 1999 he contributed to the bank's programmes to promote free trade by reducing import tariffs and other barriers, which culminated in the World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Seattle that year, at which the bank's president, James Wolfensohn, laid down a comprehensive statement of the bank's position on trade and development issues, the first such statement in many years. Bocock wrote Wolfensohn's speech.

That occasion was marked by violent street demonstrations against globalisation.

Bocock was also principal author of a series of reports to the bank's directors that became its “poverty reduction strategy”. The bank had exerted itself to help poor nations for more than 50 years, but poverty remained as pervasive as ever. The new strategy was designed to improve the bank's effectiveness at its fundamental task. It now forms the cornerstone on the relationship between poor countries, the bank and the wider “aid community”.

Bocock was a man of highly developed taste. He would recite from his canon of approved works at the drop of a hat, with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets a particular favourite.

Bocock could, to those who did not know him, appear perhaps distant and even supercilious. This was simply because he was the opposite of a tiresome extrovert. His force of character came from an inner sweetness, which in turn was informed by a Christian faith that grew deeper and stronger with time.

He is survived by his wife, Vicky, a son and a daughter.

Peter Bocock, economist, was born on June 18, 1942. He died after heart surgery on November 16, 2007, aged 65