This introductory chapter is comprised of two parts. The first is an appreciation of John McCombie in terms of his contributions to economics. The second part is an introduction to the chapters that follow.
1 John McCombie: An Appreciation
It is almost by pure chance that John McCombie ended up as an economist. He essentially began his academic career when he went up to Downing College at the University of Cambridge to read for the Geographical Tripos. He had an interest in economic geography, broadly defined. After spending two years studying for this Tripos, John considered that some training in Economics was essential for a full understanding of these topics. He therefore changed subject to read for Part II of the Economics Tripos and graduated in 1973.
In the face of fierce competition, he was then awarded a prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship. The Scholarship provides funding for postgraduate studies at leading Commonwealth universities. This provided John with the opportunity to return to geography and to study for an MA in Geography at McMaster University in Canada. At the time, the Department of Geography there had some notable quantitative and theoretical economic geographers under whom John wished to study. It was there that he wrote his first published paper, a comment on âUtility Accessibility and Entropy in Spatial Modellingâ (McCombie 1975),1 which was the first of many influential papers to come. After the productive year spent in Canada, John won a SSRC grant (as it then was) to return to Cambridge University to undertake research for a PhD. He was faced with an embarrassment of riches as he had offers from both the Faculty of Economics and Politics and the Department of Geography; he chose the former.
John returned to his old College, Downing, as a postgraduate student and was subsequently elected to a Bye-Fellowship of the College. So began his love of teaching and working with students as he undertook supervisions for the College for the first time. His first academic post was at the University of Hull, where the Department of Economics was looking for a regional economist (he turned down a Fulbright scholarship, which provided funding for further research to be undertaken in a leading US university, to take up the lectureship). He took up this appointment in 1977 and in 1986 took leave of absence to spend three years at the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He returned to the UK in 1989 to take up a post in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge and was immediately offered a Fellowship in Economics and Land Economy at his old College. The Land Economy Tripos is an interdisciplinary subject, drawing on the disciplines, inter alios, of law, economics and real estate management. This environment suited Johnâs interdisciplinary background and his research. He continued to publish widely and to build on his international reputation.
His move to Cambridge brought with it a host of administrative duties including being Director of Studies in the three subjects Economics, Land Economy and Management Studies for Downing College and Director of Studies for Land Economy for Christâs and Girton Colleges. With the late Nigel Allington, he built up Downing economics with its 18 students, so that in terms of economics degree results, it became one of the top five Cambridge colleges. As Director of Studies and supervisor, John excelled at the small-group teaching, gaining great pleasure from imparting knowledge to some of the brightest students in the UK. He was a very popular supervisor. He also had many PhD students, enjoying the two-way interchange of ideas. Most of his students went on to distinguished careers in academia, including professorships, or to work for international institutions such as the World Bank.
John spent the rest of his academic career at Cambridge, becoming Professor in Regional and Applied Economics, and working in his large 200-year-old study, with its wonderful views over the Downing domusâthere can be few nicer places to write academic papers. During his tenure at Land Economy, he achieved substantial private funding that enabled him and Philip Arestis, as Director of Research, to establish the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Policy. The Centre also funded a Senior Research Associate. It built up an international reputation in such diverse areas ranging from monetary economics (both theory and policy), regional economic theory and policy to post-Keynesian economics , in general. In collaboration with the Department of Applied Economics V of the University of the Basque Country, the Centre has regularly organized what has now become one of the major European economics conferences, which, at the time of writing, is into its 15th year. The conference regularly leads to high-quality publications.
During his academic career, John has been invited to hold a variety of important appointments outside the University. He was a co-editor of Urban Analysis and Policy, Regional Studies and a founding co-editor of Spatial Economic Analysis. He has been an Economic Consultant to both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, acting as editor of the Asian Development Review for a number of years. He was Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords European Union Sub-Committee on the Future of the EU Structural and Cohesion Funds (2008/2009), reflecting his high standing in regional economics. He was particularly delighted to be elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences (FAcSS) and Fellow of the Regional Sciences Association (FeRSA). He was a specialist for Town and Country Planning (reflecting his interdisciplinary background) in the Teaching Quality Assessment for the Higher Education Funding Council of England and the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council in the late 1990s. Over the years, he has received numerous invitations from universities to come as a Visiting Professor. These included the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain; Keio University, Japan; Pomona College, USA; the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil; and the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Globalization Research and Queen Mary University of London.
There is no doubt that a powerful influence on an economistâs approach to his or her subject is the academic training, often for the doctorate. It is not for nothing that the Jesuitsâ motto is âgive me the child until he is seven and I will give you the manâ. During the time John was pursuing his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the early 1970s, there was what might be best termed a school of âCambridge Economicsâ. These included some intellectual heavyweights such as Nicky Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Luigi Pasinetti, Bob Rowthorn and Geoff Harcourt. It is probably fair to say that what gave the group its coherence was more its rejection of neoclassical economics than anything else. On the applied side, there was also Wynne Godley and the Cambridge Economic Policy Group.
John had come to Cambridge to do his PhD in the area of what was then called the âNew Urban Economicsâ. However, he became intrigued by the debate between Kaldor and Rowthorn at that time over what was then a deceptively simple relationship between the growth of productivity and output known as the Verdoorn law. This was interpreted as providing evidence of substantial dynamic and static increasing returns to scale.
This debate raised some intriguing issues and led first to what was going to be a temporary diversion of Johnâs research. However, he eventually switched his PhD research to a full-time consideration of various aspects of the law and the Kaldorian approach to growth. This led to a large number of papers on the subject, including papers extending the Kaldor -Rowthorn debate (McCombie 1981a), new empirical evidence using US state data (McCombie and de Ridder 1983) and quantifying the importance of Kaldorâs laws (McCombie 1980). Inevitably Johnâs interests developed over time to other areas of what might be best termed post -Keynesian economics. But he returned to the Verdoorn law throughout his career. One thing that had bothered him was what he termed the âStatic-Dynamic Verdoorn law paradoxâ. Many studies using cross -regional data and conventional aggregate production functions estimated in log level found very small increasing or constant returns to scale. Paradoxically, using the same regional data set, the estimation of the Verdoorn law using growth rates gave estimates of significant increasing returns to scale. Johnâs (McCombie 1982a) initial attempt to provide an explanation of this was not convincing, even to himself. It was not until several years later with Mark Roberts that he provided a satisfactory explanation (McCombie and Roberts 2007). It had to do with spatial aggregation bias.
Inevitably, recent developments in econometrics have led to a reconsideration of earlier studies and this is true of the extended Verdoorn law. In the latter case, it was the development of spatial autocorrelation estimation techniques. Johnâs more recent work with his co-authors, using these more sophisticated techniques, has confirmed earlier results (Angeriz et al. 2008, 2009).
A further area of research where John has made a significant contribution has been in the area of balance-of-payments-constrained growth. This approach originated in a short note by Tony Thirlwall, published in 1979. John was at initially somewhat sceptical of this argument and this led him to publish a short comment on the analysis of the same journal (McCombie 1981b). The upshot was an invitation by Tony Thirlwall to visit him at his University to discuss their differences, which turned out to be small. There followed a fruitful collaboration on the subject for many years including a major book published in 1994. Since then there has been an explosion of the literature on balance-of-payments to which John has again returned to make influential contributions.
John has become a leading authority and developed an international reputation for the extension of a fundamental critique of the neoclassical aggregated production function. One of the outcomes of the Cambridge capital theory controversies of the late 1960s was that the results from an aggregate production function did not hold outside of a one-commodity world. Aggregation theorems also gave the same result. Over time, the Cambridge capital theory controversies have been relegated to the history of economic thought and largely forgotten. The reason seems to have been an implicit reliance on the not compelling Friedmanâs methodology of economics. According to Friedman, what matters is not the realism or otherwise of the assumptions of a model, but its predictive power. Douglasâs statistical work in the 1930s with various colleagues using cross -industry or cross -state data found remarkably good statistical fits with the output elasticities very close to the factor shares. Time-series data usually, but not always, gave good fits. Hence, statistical estimations of aggregate production functions increased during the post-war period using ever more sophisticated statistical techniques. The good statistical fits were taken at both the textbook and advanced level to confirm that markets we...