My friend Paul Mosley, who has died aged 79, was a scholar of development economics and a leading advocate for making foreign aid more effective.
He held positions in economics and development studies departments from 1971 at universities including Strathclyde, Bath, Manchester and Reading. His last post was as professor of economics at Sheffield University, from where he retired in 2020.
Along with his academic roles, Paul worked as an economist for the UK’s Overseas Development Administration (ODA) early in his career and later as an adviser to United Nations agencies. Behind all of his life and work was an energetic desire to “make the world a better place”.
His first focused on African economic history, the subject of his PhD, which was later published as a book, The Settler Economies (1983). Witnessing the low living standards in rural Kenya and Zimbabwe during his research led him to concentrate on policy, endeavouring to directly address the situations he had seen. In the 1980s he played a key role at a thinktank, the Independent Group on British Aid (IGBA), and from 1992 until 1998 worked as a trustee for the charity ActionAid.
Among his best known publications were Foreign Aid: Its Defense and Reform (1987); Aid and Power (1995) with John Toye and Jane Harrigan, which provided highly original analysis of World Bank and IMF policy; and Finance Against Poverty (1996) with me.
In the latter part of Paul’s career he broadened out his approach. He contrasted poverty reduction efforts in high-income and low-income countries, and with Barbara Ingham wrote a biography of Sir Arthur Lewis (2012), the Nobel economics laureate who was the first black professor in a British university.
Born in London, Paul was one of the four children of Eric Mosley, an economist and later a director of industrial relations at the National Coal Board, and Moira (nee Brown). The family later moved to Paris, and then Nottingham, where Paul attended Nottingham high school. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study economics, graduating in 1968, and completed his PhD at Cambridge in 1980 (his master’s was completed at Essex University).
In 1986 he married Helena Dwornik, an artist. He was a devoted father to their children, Francesca and Nick, and an enthusiastic grandfather. He adored mountains and was a keen outdoorsman (at Manchester he chose to live in a cottage below Kinder Scout, a mere “hill” compared to the uplands of his beloved Skye, which he visited regularly for more than 30 years). Indoors, Paul was a talented linguist (Italian was his favourite of the seven languages he knew) and an accomplished clarinet player.
He is survived by Helena, and his children and four grandchildren, Aria, Rory, Leo and Rafa, and by his brother Francis and sister, Kate.
