Stone, Sir Richard (1913-1991), a British economist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1984 for developing methods to measure national and international economies. These methods are now used worldwide.
John Richard Nicholas Stone was born in London. In 1935, he received an economics degree at Cambridge University. In 1939, he joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare, which was set up at the beginning of World War II (1939-1945). Stone became an assistant to the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes at the Central Statistical Office in 1940. During the war, Stone worked on developing national income and expenditure statistics, the first time such official statistics had been drawn up. After the war, Stone became director of the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge. In that post, he set up a standard system of accounts for the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), a group of 17 European nations that worked for economic recovery after the war. In 1952, he began the Cambridge Growth Project, which developed a set of mathematical formulas called an econometric model to describe the British economy. This model was a way of measuring consumption, investment, and government spending, and was one of the largest models of a national economy.
Stone was a consultant to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international organization that succeeded the OEEC, and to the United Nations Statistical Office, adapting the British model for international use. Stone was knighted in 1978. He retired in 1980.
See also Econometrics ; Economics ; Keynes, John Maynard ; National income .
