Michael Ward (economist)

After retirement, Ward's expertise and advice continued to be sought by international agencies as well as by national statistical offices including those of China and India. The 2004 publication Quantifying the World, part of the UN's Intellectual History Project, was one of his major achievements in this period. It reviewed the achievements and failures of the United Nation statistical services over the previous 60 years.

Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an active member of the International Statistical Institute and the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. In 1999 he was awarded the Henry Willem Methorst Medal of the International Statistical Institute for "outstanding contributions to international statistics." In 2000, he was elected Chair of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth and he served for several years on the Statistical Advisory Panel for the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report.

His contributions to edited volumes included the Encyclopædia Britannica (on economic forecasting and international comparisons); Indicator Systems for Political, Economic and Social Analysis (Taylor); Development in small countries (Selwyn); Development Planning in Developing Countries (OECD); Surveys and Social Statistics (Bulmer); International Comparisons (Heston and Summers); Problems and Issues in International Comparisons (Salazar-Camillo and Rao); National Accounts in Developing Countries (OECD); 1999 ISI Conference (Helsinki), Collected Papers; 2001 ISI Conference (Seoul), Collected Papers; Statistics and Human Rights (IAOS Montreux, 2000), Selected Papers.

In 1985, Ward worked as Principal Economist at the World Bank. In 1995 Ward was appointed head of the Bank's Statistical Advisory Services and in this capacity he worked the OECD's Development Aid Committee in drawing up a set of international development targets which later became the Millennium Development Goals, addressing a range of economic, social, demographic and environmental concerns. Ward retired in 2000.

His links with the OECD began in the early 1970s. He participated in workshops on statistics in developing countries at the OECD Development Centre. In 1975, between the UNESCO assignments and the post at Sussex University, he worked for a few months as consultant for OECD on the measurement of capital. In 1982, Ward joined the OECD full-time and made the first OECD-Eurostat purchasing power parity calculations for 1980.

Ward worked in many developing countries and gained wide experience of statistics and their use in framing policies for economic and social development. He started work in 1961 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) in what was then the Statistical Office of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. A few years later he worked in the statistical office of Lesotho and from there moved to Fiji, where he was Head of the Government Statistical Service. From 1972 he worked for UNESCO as a regional statistical advisor in southern Africa, an assignment that took him to Lesotho, Botswana, Malawi, Swaziland, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. From 1999 to 2000 he worked in Phnom Penh as Director of Rehabilitation and Economic Advisor in the UN peacekeeping mission to Cambodia.

Ward took an honours degree in statistics and economics at the University of Exeter in 1958 and was later awarded his Master of Arts at the University of Cambridge. In 1965 he was elected fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and worked as Director of Economic Studies. He served as dean of the college from 1970 to 1972. In 1975 he was appointed Director of the Statistical Program at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Michael Ward (1939 – 2008) was a British economist and statistician who contributed significantly to the evolution of the international statistical system in the post-war period.