Nicholas Kaldor One of Cambridge's foremost economists in the post-war period Date of Birth: 12.05.1908 Country: Great Britain

Nicholas Kaldor: A Biography

Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor (born Káldor Miklós), was born on May 12, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary. He received his education in Budapest, Berlin, and the London School of Economics, where he later began his teaching career.

After serving in the military during World War II, Kaldor held a high position in the Economic Commission for Europe. From 1964, he served as an advisor to the Labour government in the United Kingdom and was a consultant in several other countries, playing a key role in the development of early value-added tax (VAT) memoranda. In 1966, he became a professor of economics at the University of Cambridge. In 1974, Kaldor was awarded a life peerage.

Kaldor is known for developing the famous Kaldor-Hicks efficiency criterion, a modified version of the Pareto optimality principle. This criterion suggests that a transition from one economic state to another increases overall welfare if those who benefit from the transition are potentially able to compensate those who are worse off. He also contributed to the development of the simplest dynamic model, the cobweb model, used to demonstrate the price formation process in competitive markets. Kaldor argued that there are certain regularities observed during economic growth, known as the Kaldor technical progress curve. He introduced the concept of 'convenience yield' related to commodity markets and was involved in the initial development of the theory of storage, which was primarily undertaken by Holbrook Working.

Kaldor was married to Clarissa Goldsmith, a prominent figure in the Cambridge community, and together they raised four daughters. One of their daughters, Frances Stewart, became a professor of development economics at the University of Oxford, while another, Mary Kaldor, became a professor of human security at the London School of Economics.

Nicholas Kaldor passed away on September 30, 1986, in Papworth Everard, Cambridgeshire, at the age of 78.