Alan Walters

Professor Sir Alan Arthur Walters (17 June 1926 – 3 January 2009) was a British economist, best known as the former Chief Economic Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1981 to 1983 and again in 1989 after his return from the USA.

Walters was born in Leicester, and his father was a Communist and a grocer who sold goods from a van. He failed his 11-Plus and attended Alderman Newton's School in Leicester, leaving at fifteen to work as a machine operator in a shoe factory. He joined the British Army as a private.

Walters studied statistics at University College Leicester and then went to Nuffield College, Oxford, where he took an MA in economics. On leaving Nuffield in 1951, he took up a post to teach statistics at Birmingham University, later becoming professor of econometrics and statistics there in the early 1960s. He was one of the first British economists to argue that money was "of considerable importance" to economic activity, a view that became more widespread during "the Great Inflation" of the 1970s. He argued forcefully that Britain should maintain strict monetary targets, and that the money supply should not be manipulated for political reasons.

In 1968–70 he was a member of the Commission on the Third London Airport (the "Roskill Commission").

After serving as a professor at the London School of Economics from 1968 to 1976, where he was Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of Economics, Walters became an economic adviser to the World Bank and a professor in the Economics Department at The Johns Hopkins University.

...
Wikipedia