My friend and former colleague Graham Pyatt, who has died aged 86, was a founding member of the department of economics at the University or Warwick, having been appointed professor of mathematical economics there at the age of 28.
While at Warwick he was influential in the creation of several degree programmes, was also a consultant to the accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand (1968-74), and was responsible for the early BBC Election Night computer predictions (1968-74), presenting cameo insights into the results, on-screen, alongside the political scientist David Butler.
Graham was born in Bramhall, near Stockport, the eldest child of Frank Pyatt, who owned a cotton mill in Bolton, and his wife, Muriel “Betty” Downs. He attended Bolton school and then Ellesmere college, before studying economics and statistics at Manchester University, after which he did an MA in the same subject at the University of Chicago and a diploma in statistics at Nuffield College, Oxford.
He subsequently joined the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University as a junior research officer. There he worked on the Cambridge Growth Project and completed his PhD under the direction of the Nobel laureate Sir Richard Stone before his meteoric rise to become a chair in mathematical economics at Warwick in 1964.
A decade later he left Warwick when he was invited by the World Bank vice-president Hollis Chenery to be senior adviser in its Development Research Centre, helping to put poverty reduction rather than growth at the centre stage of World Bank policies.
Graham’s role was to develop the necessary analytical and statistical tools to do this, including the concept of a social accounting matrix, which had been pioneered by Stone. Using social accounting matrices, he helped to develop various modelling techniques for policy analysis and inspired many young economic modellers while also helping to initiate the Living Standards Measurement Study, a major household survey programme designed to monitor the effects of policies on poorer people.
After leaving the World Bank in 1986 he returned to Warwick until a final move to the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague in 1994 and retirement in 2002.
Graham’s 1959 marriage to Alison Dykes ended in divorce in 1982, after which, in 1988, he married his former secretary Shirley Patterson, who died in 2019.
Graham was a warm and generous man, an independent thinker and an inspirational teacher, supervisor and collaborator. Apart from his work, good food and conversation were what he enjoyed most.
He is survived by three daughters, Lyn, Jo and Lisa, from his first marriage, and two stepsons, David and Richard, from his second.
