Geoffrey Colin Harcourt (27 June 1931 – 7 December 2021) was an Australian academic economist and leading member of the post-Keynesian school. He studied at the University of Melbourne and then at King's College, Cambridge.

Biography

After studying economics at the University of Melbourne he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he received his doctorate. In 1958, he moved to the University of Adelaide as a lecturer and was appointed to a chair in Economics at Adelaide in 1967. (He was a University Lecturer at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall 1964–66, on leave without pay from Adelaide). He was a University Lecturer (1982–90) and Reader (1990–98) in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge and a Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics, Jesus College, Cambridge, 1982–98, and was President of Jesus College Cambridge, 1988–89 and 1990–92. Harcourt made major contributions to the understanding of the ideas of Keynes, Joan Robinson and other Cambridge economists. He also made important contributions in his own right to post-Keynesian and post-Kaleckian theory. A review article of one of his volumes of 'Selected Essays' argues that (i) insofar as he has written on capital theory, it has been as an innovator and not as a mere raconteur, and (ii) that he has developed his own suite of post-Keynesian models – this is evident, for example, in his 1965 paper "A two-sector model of the distribution of income and the level of employment in the short-run" which is reprinted in The Social Science Imperialists: Selected Essays of G.C. Harcourt (edited by Prue Kerr). He was married to Joan Harcourt and they had four children: Wendy Harcourt, a full professor at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (married to Claudio Sardoni, honorary professor at La Sapienza University of Rome, with two children, Caterina Sardoni and Emma Claire Sardoni); Robert Harcourt, a marine ecology professor at Macquarie University; Tim Harcourt, also an economist (married to Jo Bosben); and Rebecca Harcourt, program manager for Indigenous business education at the University of New South Wales. Harcourt died on 7 December 2021, at the age of 90.

Honours

Selected publications

Book chapters

Articles, a selection