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.