Seers, Dudley (1920–1983)

Abstract

Seers was educated at Rugby and Pembroke College, Cambridge, and served in the Royal Navy during World War II. Once the war was over he joined the Prime Minister’s Office in New Zealand, but by 1946 had moved to Oxford. He became a leading economist in the field of development studies, moving from his early work in statistics and national income to a wide range of topics in development and an extraordinary diversity of country studies. In his later work he turned back to the problems of developed countries, in two major edited volumes on the European Economic Community. His claim was one that increasingly finds echo: the study of the underdeveloped world provides much insight into the structural problems of the developed countries.