Sir Hans Singer.

• Author: Shaw, John
• Position: Hans Wolfgang Singer - In memoriam

HANS SINGER, who died on 26 February 2006 at the age of 95, was one of the best-known and most-respected pioneering analysts of the challenges facing developing countries. His professional career spanned over seven decades and his work was recognized in honorary doctorates and a knighthood in 1994 "for services to economic issues".

He was included as one of the ten "pioneers in development" in a book published by the World Bank in 1984. He was awarded the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award for Research and Education in 1994/1995, the UN World Food Programme Food for Life Award in 2001, and a lifetime achievement award in 2004 by the United Kingdom's Development Studies Association. Six festschriften were written in his honour, which show the depth and breadth of his influence in development studies, and the esteem and affection in which he was held. He produced 450 publications, in books, reports and articles, which are catalogued in his biography*

Singer was born in 1910 into a strongly assimilated, largely secular, middle-class Jewish family, in what is now Wuppertal in the German Rhineland. The "twists of fate" that led to him becoming a world famous development economist began in 1929. He entered Bonn University with the intention of studying medicine-his father was a doctor-but switched to economics after attending a lecture by the famous economist of the Austrian school, Joseph Schumpeter, and came under his spell and that of his masterpiece, The Theory of Economic Development (1912). Singer's promising academic career-in Germany was cut short when Hitler came to power and he had to flee to England.

After receiving a doctorate in economics from Cambridge in 1936, Singer's first employment after university was a major two-year study of long-term unemployment in the depressed areas of Britain. As a member of a small team, he lived with the poor during the study and produced a seminal report, Men Without Work (1938). He continued to write, including a series of twelve articles on the German war economy for The Economic Journal (1940-1944), at the request of John Maynard Keynes, who was co-editor of the journal.

In 1947, another twist of fate was to redirect Singer's career, this time with an international dimension. David Owen, who had worked with Singer on the Pilgrim Trust study, was appointed as the first head of the UN Department of Economic Affairs. Owen sought Singer's services to strengthen his new department. During his time...