But the opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union with his father intervened

But the opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union with his father intervened. The visit took place shortly after the excesses of Stalin’s class war and just as bread rationing had ended. The Bank of England was able to provide useful contacts and Reddaway used the occasion to prepare The Russian Financial System (1935), his first book, describing a world now long gone. However, the Bank of England itself was not particularly stimulating and in 1936 he started a two-year contract in Australia.Clare College, with which he had hitherto had no connection, offered Reddaway a teaching Fellowship to start in 1938 on completion of his contract in Australia. This was the beginning of 60 years of undergraduate teaching He also completed his second book. The Economics of a Declining Population (1939) becomes, unlike his first book, of ever-increasing relevance to today’s world with each year that passes.The Second World War took Reddaway to the Board of Trade.

One of his early tasks was the design of a system of clothes rationing. People were allocated coupons and they had to pay for clothes with coupons as well as money. Reddaway’s mother-in-law helpfully supplied a pattern book which allowed him to work out prices for clothes in terms of coupons.These experiences built on his view of economics as a practical subject designed to address and resolve real-world problems; some of these now appear as issues arising in a world recovering from a bout of madness. He returned to academic life in 1947, going back to Clare but at the same time found himself dealing with another rationing issue, that of making sense of petrol rationing. With others he produced a classic text, Measurement of Production Movements (1948). This explained in great detail how the Index of Industrial Production was constructed.

It set a standard for the documentation of statistical procedures which the Office for National Statistics today finds it difficult to live up to.In 1955 Reddaway became Director of the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge. This gave him the opportunity to run a large research team, again doing the sort of empirical work he found fascinating. Among his studies there were two he regarded as being of particular interest. With foreign exchange rationed until 1979, there was a policy question as to what extent British firms should be allowed to invest abroad. Such investment used up foreign currency which might be needed to pay for imports.

Reddaway was one of the first economists to address the question of foreign investment and to try to identify its effect on the economy. His conclusion was that it was worthwhile and should not be discouraged unless pressure on the foreign-exchange reserves was particularly acute.The second question was one of taxation. Reddaway’s colleague Nicholas (later Lord) Kaldor, on the basis of empirical work since shown to be wrong, persuaded the 1966 Labour government to tax the employment of people in the service industries. The theory was that this would encourage employment in manufacturing and thereby lead to an increase in manufacturing productivity.