Robert Neild

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Robert Neild is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University.

Elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1971, he has also served on the Secretariat of the UN Economic Commission for Europe and has held posts in the UK Cabinet Office, HM Treasury (its first Economic Advisor in the 1960s) and at the MIT Center for International Studies, India Project. A former Deputy Director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, he was in 1996 appointed as founding Director (with Alva Myrdal and then Gunnar Myrdalas chairman) of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and has held other influential posts in commerce and on advisory bodies. Also in 1966, he was appointed by Harold Wilson as a member of the Fulton Committee on the Civil Service.

Widely published on issues concerned with economics and peace studies, he is also the author of the essential The English, The French and the Oyster. Written on his retirement and spurred by a holiday in France, this is a historical-economic exploration of relative prices of oysters in Britain and France and the political and economic origins of these. He has also written Public Corruption: The Dark Side of Social Evolution (Anthem S.)

Among memorable recent quotes, rebuffing Blair’s figures, he wrote: "To say they have found enough weapons to kill the world several times over is equivalent to the statement that a man who produces a million sperm a day can thus produce a million babies a day. The problem in both cases is one of delivery systems."