Economic ‘giant’ Max Corden dies, aged 96

Former Reserve Bank of Australia board member and economist Bob Gregory, who was taught by Professor Corden at university, said he “was one of our great economists”.

“Max lived economics and seemed to embody it,” Professor Gregory said on Monday. “In the tariff area he was a giant and so influential.”

Professor Corden influenced many of Australia’s prominent public policy economists, such as former adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke, Ross Garnaut, former Treasury secretary Ted Evans, former Labor trade minister and Hawke adviser Craig Emerson, and Labor MP and academic Andrew Leigh, who launched one of his books in Canberra.

Global influence

Peter Drysdale, emeritus professor of economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, said that “more than anyone else Corden set out the intellectual case against Australia’s high post-war levels of trade protection”.

“He developed rigorous new ways of measuring its impact, not only on consumers but also the impact of the structure of tariffs and the patterns of effective protection on efficient producers in mining, agriculture and manufacturing.”

Professor Corden’s international career included a stint at the International Monetary Fund in Washington and teaching at Oxford University in the United Kingdom and Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

He expanded into monetary policy and macroeconomics and was a member of the Group of 30, an international forum of current and former chiefs of central banks, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlement and private lenders.

One of his students at Oxford University in the early 1970s, Martin Wolf, now the Financial Times chief economics commentator, previously described Professor Corden as Australia’s greatest living economist.

‘Always curious’

Professor Corden worked on trade liberalisation and championed the case to replace the quantitative restrictions on foreign imports – widespread at the time – with lower uniform tariff rates to reduce distortions in the economy.

He pushed the idea of the “effective rate of protection”, which calculated the true cost of tariffs by taking into account an industry’s value-add to the economy and the use of imported goods as intermediate inputs.

His views appeared regularly in The Australian Financial Review, which supported “the outstanding scholar’s” suggestion of a modest uniform tariff of, say, 10 or 15 per cent rather than “extension of a piecemeal hunt-and-peck system of granting protection that favours the strong pressure groups and the politically vocal”.

Dr Emerson said Professor Corden was a “clear, logical and methodical thinker” who was driven by economic evidence rather than ideology.

“He was always curious and asked questions,” Dr Emerson said.

“His books were accessible and full of diagrams, not algebra or mathematics.

“He was very compassionate and would have believed that his trade work was good for poor people and poor countries.”

Professor Corden’s published memoir, Lucky Boy in the Lucky Country, covers the painful story of how he, his older brother and parents escaped Hitler.

His nine-year-old and 11-year-old cousins and his uncle Willy Cohn – a historian, World War I Iron Cross recipient and celebrated diarist of Jewish life in Germany during the 1930s, were murdered in a Lithuanian concentration camp.

Economist Jerome Fahrer said earlier this month that Professor Corden would be a “thoroughly deserving winner of the economics Nobel Prize”.

“His work on international trade makes him a giant of the profession.”