Professor Brownlie new Monetary Council head

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32797, 23 December 1971, Page 2

Professor Brownlie new Monetary Council head

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright)

WELLINGTON, December 22.

The appointment of Professor A. D. Brownlie, of Christchurch, as chairman of the Monetary and Economic Council was announced today by the Minister of Finance (Mr Muldoon).

Professor Brownlie succeeds Professor F. W. Holmes, of Wellington, who is going abroad on sabbatical leave on January 15.

Professor Brownlie, aged 39, is head of the University of Canterbury economics de-

partment. He gained his M. Com., with first-class honours in economics, at the University of Auckland. He was in the economics department there from 1956 to 1964, rising from tutor to associate professor. He was appointed to his present position in 1965. Mr Muldoon said that Professor Brownlie had developed a strong, flourishing economics group at Canterbury which, this year, had 31 students gaining masters’ degrees in economics, an exceptionally high number which was probably a record for New Zealand. Professor Holmes, who holds the chair of money and finance at Victoria University of Wellington, had given outstanding service as chairman of the council from 1961 to 1964 and again since 1970, said Mr Muldoon.

Under Professor Holmes’s chairmanship the reports of the council bore the imprint of ability, integrity, independence and plain speaking, as well as reflecting a humanist outlook; the Government and the people were indebted to him.

Professor Brownlie was the 1963 Nuffield Foundation travelling fellow and visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he undertook research and the further study of economics. He was dean of the faculty of commerce at Canterbury frdm 1967 until 1970, and spent three months in the United States in 1967 on a Camegie Corporation grant. In 1968, Professor Brownlie was a member of the sixth group of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East experts on programming techniques, and of the seventh group in 1969. His

research activities have tended to centre on the application of statistics in economic analysis. Professor Holmes will spend nine months overseas visiting universities and, in the main, studying financial systems and monetary policies. He will first go to Canberra for a month, then to the United States for five weeks, and next to Britain and Europe. He will visit Denmark and Ireland which, as a result of the pending enlargement of the European Economic Community, have, in his view, problems not dissimilar to those of New Zealand. On his way back to New Zealand, Professor Holmes will attend a central banking course in Malaysia, and will spend some time in Singapore, and then Australia.