Michael Ward

Michael Ward (1939 – 2008) was a British economist and statistician who contributed significantly to the evolution of the international statistical system in the post-war period. Education and career Ward took an honours degree in statistics and economics at the University of Exeter in 1958 and was later awarded his Master of Arts at the University of Cambridge. In 1965 he was elected fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and worked as Director of Economic Studies. He served as dean of the college from 1970 to 1972. In 1975 he was appointed Director of the Statistical Program at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. At both at Cambridge and Sussex he worked with some of the foremost development economists of the time, including Richard Jolly, Graham Pyatt, Dudley Seers, and Richard Stone—people who, as Ward observed in his book Quantifying the World, "abhorred any suggestion that facts be fit to theory and spent their lives building theory around observed facts and creating frameworks that more usefully depicted how the real world worked." Ward worked in many developing countries and gained wide experience of statistics and their use in framing policies for economic and social development. He started work in 1961 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) in what was then the Statistical Office of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. A few years later he worked in the statistical office of Lesotho and from there moved to Fiji, where he was Head of the Government Statistical Service. From 1972 he worked for UNESCO as a regional statistical advisor in southern Africa, an assignment that took him to Lesotho, Botswana, Malawi, Swaziland, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. From 1999 to 2000 he worked in Phnom Penh as Director of Rehabilitation and Economic Advisor in the UN peacekeeping mission to Cambodia.