Richard Goode, IMF fiscal policy pioneer, dies at 94

A pioneer of the Fund’s work on fiscal policy, Richard Goode’s influence is still felt in the institution he served for almost a quarter century. IMF First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky, who served under Goode’s tutelage some 30 years ago, said “Richard Goode’s combination of first-rank scholarship, expertise on operational fiscal issues, and understated manner earned him the deep respect of his colleagues.”

By the time Richard Goode, a U.S. national, was appointed as first Director of the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) in 1965, he was already established as a highly regarded public finance expert.

Goode began his career as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. An early exposure to public finance came in 1950 as a member of a United National technical assistance team to Bolivia.

Mr. Goode then joined the IMF in 1951. He spent the next eight years working in the then Research and Statistics department, which was the heart and soul of the Fund’s analytic and policy work. In 1959, Goode took time out from the Fund to work with other leading tax experts as a scholar at the Brookings Institute until the mid-1960s.

During this time he solidified his stature as a leading tax policy expert, “especially after the publication of his long-indispensible book on U.S. policy, The Individual Income Tax,” recounts IMF historian James Boughton. This followed The Corporation Income Tax (1951), which Goode wrote while still at the University of Chicago.

In April 1964, the Executive Board established the Fiscal Affairs Department as a way to strengthen the Fund’s growing engagement in fiscal policy assistance and advice. With Fund management keen to have a leading expert at the helm, Richard Goode was a natural choice and he returned to the Fund from his position at Brookings in 1965.

According to James Boughton “over the next 16 years, until he reached mandatory retirement age, Goode built the department into a leading source of research on fiscal policy and of technical assistance on tax administration, public expenditure policy, debt...