In memory of Professor Graham Pyatt

It is with great sadness that the Department of Economics announce the death of our former Head of Department and colleague - Professor Graham Pyatt, who passed away last week.

Graham was the first appointment made by Dick Sargent when the Department was founded in 1965. He was appointed as Professor of Mathematical Economics at the young age of 28. He was therefore influential in the early development of the Department, working alongside Dick Sargent in those formative years. Prior to coming to Warwick, Graham was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and a member of the Department of Applied Economics, working with Sir Richard Stone on the Cambridge Growth Project. In the early years at Warwick Graham was also involved in various assignments at University level (e.g. setting up the CIEBR, a forerunner of WBS, with Hugh Clegg). At that time he became a consultant to the World Employment Programme (WEP), International Labour Organisation, on macro planning and policy in Sri Lanka and Iran.

His WEP work attracted the attention of Hollis Chenery, Vice President of the World Bank. In 1975 Graham left Warwick when he was appointed Senior Advisor in the Development Research Centre, at the World Bank. In that role Graham inspired and led several major research projects on income distribution and economy-wide modelling. Part of this work was to develop and apply social accounting matrices (SAMs) in a developing country context, a concept that had been pioneered earlier by Sir Richard Stone.

Graham returned to Warwick in 1987 as Coopers and Lybrand Research Professor in Economics. He left seven years later to take up a chair in the Economics of Development at the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague, where he stayed until his retirement. Students and many others found Graham an inspirational teacher, supervisor and collaborator. He lived a full and varied life and has made many influential contributions as well as helping many scholars along their way.

• Read a tribute to Graham from his former colleagues Alan Roe and Jeff Round.
• Jeff Round also contributed an obituary of Graham Pyatt to the Guardian, published on 27 March 2023.