Meade, James Edward (1907-1995), a British economist, was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for economics for his studies in international trade and finance. He shared the prize with Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin.
Meade wrote the two-volume work The Theory of International Politics (The Balance of Payments, 1951, and Trade and Welfare, 1955). In this work, he tried to integrate John Maynard Keynes’s theories with classical theories of economics to form a unified model of economics and politics that worked at both national and international levels. Keynes was an important economic theorist who promoted a move toward greater government spending to increase investment, which in turn would increase employment. Meade examined the effects of various policies concerning taxation and trade, in particular how regulating trade affected general welfare.
Meade was born in Swanage, England. From 1926 to 1930, he studied classics and philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford. From 1931 to 1937, he was a fellow and lecturer at Hertford College, University of Oxford. During World War II (1939-1945), he worked for the government as a war economist. From 1947 to 1957, he was a professor at the London School of Economics and from 1957 to 1968, a professor at Cambridge University.
