Roger Kerr

Kerr was married to Margaret Northcroft for over 30 years with whom he had three sons, Bernard, Nicholas and Richard, two of whom live in the United States and one of whom lives in New Zealand. The marriage to Northcroft ended in divorce. He married Catherine Isaac in January 2010. Kerr died on 28 October 2011, after battling metastatic melanoma for a year.

Kerr spent much of his career in the economic policy debate in New Zealand. He was hired by Sir Ron Trotter and Sir Douglas Myers, then chairman and vice chairman of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, in 1986 as the first executive director. Kerr was a vocal proponent of Rogernomics and of policies that can be broadly characterised as free market. Before leading the Business Roundtable, he joined the New Zealand Treasury at age 32. At the Treasury he served as Director of Economics II and was part of the team of economists that authored Economic Management, the briefing paper presented to the Fourth Labor Government of New Zealand, which many regard as the blueprint for the economic reforms that followed. Kerr later became an assistant secretary.

He served as a director of the Electricity Corporation of New Zealand from 1986 to 1994, as a member of the Council of Victoria University of Wellington from 1995 to 1999, and as a member of the Group Board of Colonial Limited in Melbourne from 1996 to 2000.

Roger Lawrence Kerr CNZM (17 January 1945 – 28 October 2011), a public policy and business leader, was the executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, a free-market think-tank based in Wellington, New Zealand.