Roy Harrod

In 1938, Roy Harrod married Wilhelmine Cresswell, the step-daughter of General Sir Peter Strickland. Lovingly called Billa, she began campaigning for the preservation of historic churches in Norfolk once the family settled there. She was also the founder member of the Norfolk Churches Trust.

The couple had two sons. One of them, Dominick Harrod, was the economics correspondent for the BBC.

Roy Harrod died on March 9, 1978, in Halt, Norfolk, where he had settled down after retirement. He was survived by his wife and two sons.

Roy Harrod was born on 13 February 1900, in London. His father, Henrich Dawes Harrod, was a businessman, who had invested a lot of money in a copper mine and lost most of it. He was also an author and had written two historical monographs. His mother, Frances (nee Forbes-Robertson) Harrod, was also a writer.

Harrod had always been a bright student. In 1911, when he was eleven years old, he won a scholarship and entered St. Paul’s School on it. Later he was shifted to Westminster School.

After passing out from school, he received another scholarship and enrolled at the New College in Oxford with classic literature, ancient history and philosophy as his major. However, his college education had to be interrupted for a brief period when in 1918 he was drafted in the army.

During the First World War, he served in the artillery division of the British Army. On being discharged from the military at the end of the World War I in the same year, he went back to the New College to finish his courses

Subsequently, in 1919, he majored in classic literature, ancient history and philosophy, from Oxford. For his graduation work he took up academic philosophy; but when one of the lecturers vehemently criticized his paper he turned to economics, which was at that time a very unusual subject.

In 1923, Roy Harrod began his career with a teaching post at the Christ Church College at the University of Oxford. Simultaneously, he also received research fellowship and with that he began to work on marginal revenue curve.

In 1929, he was first to derive the marginal revenue curve in his debut work, ‘Notes on Supply’. Unfortunately, the paper was published much later in June 1930 in The Economic Journal, Vol. 40, No. 158. This delay in the publication denied him the recognition due to him.

Subsequently, he began to work on the long-run envelope of short-run average cost curves and laid out the analytical foundations for the theory of imperfect competition. The paper was published in 1931, but this time too he was little late and consequently, his work went unrecognized.

Nonetheless, he kept on publishing papers. ‘International Economics’, published in 1933 was another of his important works. However, it was his ‘Doctrines of Imperfect Competition’, published in 1934, which created a stir among the academicians and made him famous.

In 1936, he published his fourth important paper ‘The Trade Cycle’. In it, he laid down some of the important points of a new theory on effective demand.

Throughout his life, Roy Harrod published numerous works. Among them, ‘Doctrines of Imperfect Competition’, published in 1934 was his first major work. Among other things, it deals on the effects of the imperfect competition on equilibrium theory.

His 1948 publication, ‘Towards a Dynamic Economics’, is said to be his most important work. The book is the result of his long research. In it, Harrod had launched an entirely new growth theory based on macroeconomic model and had emphasized on the importance of time in a growing economy.

He is also well known for his 1951 publication, ‘The Life of John Maynard Keynes’. The book is his tribute to the great economist. In it, Harrod combined his intimate knowledge of the man and his economics to produce a biography that is valuable both from economic and literary point of view.