Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Musgrave, Warren F.

Pyatt, Graham

Watson, Alistair S.

English

Research Papers in Economics

 
The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
 
, 50, pp. 265–267
 
© Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8489.2006.00334.x
 
Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK AJAR The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics  1364-985X 2006 Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society and Blackwell Publishers Ltd March 2006 50 1
 
Obituary
 
Obituary Obituary
 
Jack Duloy, 1932–2005
 
Jack Duloy, one of Australia’s more distinguished agricultural economists,
has died, aged 73. While having a notable early career in Australia, Jack’s
most signiﬁcant work was undertaken in the World Bank. Consequently, he
is relatively unsung in his native country.
On leaving North Sydney Boys high school, Jack started a law degree only
to decide that he and it were not compatible. Following a sojourn in the United
Kingdom, he enrolled in agricultural science at the University of Sydney.
In the third year of his degree, Jack had his professional epiphany; he
discovered agricultural economics. This was to transform his academic
performance. In 1958, Jack graduated with ﬁrst class honours, specialising in
agricultural economics, economics and statistics. He then enrolled for a PhD
under the supervision of Keith Campbell. Before completing that degree, he
was appointed in 1961 to a Lectureship in Agricultural Economics at the
University of New England (UNE). In 1963, reﬂecting a developing emphasis
on econometrics, Jack transferred to the Department of Economic Statistics,
which had been hived off from the Department of Agricultural Economics.
He was awarded his PhD in 1964. The subject of his thesis was resource
allocation in the Australian sheep industry.
In 1968, after two restless years in Rome with the Food and Agriculture
Organisation of the United Nations, Jack became Professor of Economic
Statistics at UNE. Two years later, in 1970, he effectively disappeared from
the lives of most of his Australian friends and colleagues, when he resigned
from the University and went to Washington as an Economist with the
Development Research Centre (DRC) of the World Bank. 
266 Obituary
 
© Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006
 
In his 10 years at UNE, Jack produced 16 publications discussing method-
ological issues, the results of research and a number of major policy matters.
Apart from his enthusiastic teaching and research supervision, the most
notable achievement of his time at UNE was his productive collaboration
with Ross Parish in studies of proposals for a reserve price (buffer stock)
scheme for the Australian wool industry. Their joint monograph on the topic
could have been an extremely valuable contribution to public policy, and
Australian woolgrowers.
 
1
 
 Typical of both Jack and Ross Parish, their work
was not just a powerful theoretical and empirical critique; it displayed pre-
scient understanding of the realpolitik of agricultural policy making in
Australia and elsewhere, noting that ‘because of the limited achievements of a
conservative  scheme, the supporters of a ﬂoor-price scheme are likely to
demand a more radical reserve price. There is thus the risk that because of
errors of judgement on the part of the authority, or because of pressure from
dissatisﬁed groups of growers, a conservative scheme would escalate into a
radical one.’
In 1974, Jack became Director of the DRC and remained in that position
till the Center was dismantled. The task of the DRC was to design and
implement a research programme that responded to the challenge set out in
Robert McNamara’s famous 1973 Nairobi speech, of reducing poverty in
developing countries. Most have only admiration for the way in which Jack
took up the challenge, which was carefully set out in a closely managed set of
essays, published in 1974 under the title 
 
Redistribution with Growth
 
.
 
2
 
 It made
a strong case for economic growth as necessary but not sufﬁcient to reduce
poverty in poor countries in the medium term. Poverty reduction strategies
could not, therefore, be indifferent to distributional concerns.
While many welcomed the central thesis of 
 
Redistribution with Growth
 
, or
RwG, as it became known, there were others who saw it as creeping social-
ism. Neither Jack Duloy, nor his beloved DRC, was to survive the loss of his
mentor’s protection following McNamara’s retirement in 1981. The newly
installed Reagan administration had its own ideas as to what the World Bank
should be about – they were focused mainly on the third world debt to
which many US banks were critically exposed at the time – and they arrived
with a very different conception of the role of a research group within an
international organisation.
Some contemporary authors refer to the 1980s as ‘the lost decade’ in
development economics. But the ideas and tools of analysis that were fash-
ioned in the DRC have all survived and can be seen to be alive and well in a
recent World Bank publication 
 
The Impact of Economic Policies on Poverty
 
1
 
 J.H. Duloy and R.M. Parish, 
 
An Appraisal of a Floor-Price Scheme for Wool
 
, New Eng-
land Marketing Studies no. 1, University of New England, 1965.
 
2
 
 Hollis Chenery, Montek S. Ahluwalia, CLG Bell, John H. Duloy and Richard Jolly
 
Redistribution with Growth
 
 OUP (1974). 
Obituary 267
 
© Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006
 
and Income Distribution
 
 (2003).
 
3
 
 Jack shepherded the people and the projects
that fashioned these tools. He was a brilliantly constructive critic of the ﬂood
of ideas that crossed his desk, and he cared deeply about the issues.
The six years as leader of the DRC were probably the most fulﬁlling of his
career, particularly as he was focused on one of the major preoccupations of
his life: how to alleviate the suffering of the poor in the developing world.
What was more, he was in an institution which was sympathetic to what he
was doing and which had not only a capacity but also a duty to apply the
recommendations arising from it. The loss of that role, and his struggles with
the new management of the Bank, were bruising experiences for him.
Jack returned to Australia in 1985. While he did not renew his links with
the Australian profession, he still actively read the relevant literature, and,
each year, till 1992, undertook a major consultancy for the Bank – work
which, ﬁnancially, he did not need to do, but which enabled him to continue
travelling the rocky road to his light on the hill.
Jack Duloy was a man of driven ambition – an ambition, not to attain
power or the accoutrements of the good life, much as these might have been
cheerfully accepted, but to contribute to the amelioration of one of the run-
ning sores of the contemporary world: the widespread incidence of poverty
and its associated traumas in the developing world.
Jack Duloy’s ambition was of considerable greatness, and, because of his
abilities he was able to achieve it, at least to an extent. As Jack Lewis
 
4
 
 said in
a message to him, shortly before he died, ‘I hope they realise at Mona Vale
[Hospital] that they are nursing someone very special’. All who knew Duloy
would agree with that.
WARREN MUSGRAVE
GRAHAM PYATT
ALISTAIR WATSON
 
3
 
 F. Bourguignon and L.A. Pereira da Silva (eds) 
 
The Impact of Economic Policies on Poverty
and Income Distribution
 
 World Bank and OUP (2003).
 
4
 
 Another great Australian agricultural economist, a man Jack Duloy greatly admired, and
Jack’s former Professor at New England.

Obituary: Jack Duloy, 1932–2005

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