Agent TypePersonGenderMaleHistoryEmeritus professor James Oliver Newton (Jim) Perkins died on 14 February 2016.
Jim was born in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England on 11 July 1924. Raised as a Methodist, his great-grandfather William Lee was a prominent primitive Methodist, he was educated at Bedford School and at Saint Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. Jim’s studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service in which he saw active duty in Belgium and Germany and was demobilised with the rank of Acting Captain in 1947.
During his studies for his Cambridge PhD thesis written on “The dollar pooling arrangements of the sterling area”, Jim visited the University of Melbourne in 1950-51. This was made possible by his appointment to a position as a research officer in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce at the University of Melbourne. Jim valued this experience very highly and in recent years made an endowment to the University of Melbourne to establish a travelling scholarship to support a student undertaking a PhD in economics of relevance to both the UK and Australia. The first recipient began his studies at the University of Melbourne in September 2015
On completion of his PhD thesis, Jim joined the staff of The Economist and The Banker. This was followed by a return to Australia to take up a research fellowship at the Australian National University for the period 1953 to 1956. In 1957 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Melbourne where he remained for the rest of his life. He was appointed Professor in 1970.
Jim was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia in 1973 and a Jubilee Fellow in 2015.
Jim Perkins made many contributions to the debate on Australian economic policy. His main concerns were inflation and unemployment, and international issues such as the international financial system, exchange rates and the balance of payments. His corpus of work, which is large and includes many books, applied a strong theoretical base to policy issues and yet in the main did not use mathematics and formal modelling. Future scholars may be interested in how Perkins was able to think theoretically without explicit use of mathematics. Perkins’ approach meant he was able to cover many aspects of the issues studied. His broad coverage has been commented on by distinguished Australian economists including Sir John Crawford. Interest may also be stirred by the fact that he worked on the most important macroeconomic policy issues of the day.
