Prominent former UNCTAD Director died at age 98. As head of research, Mr. Stone was instrumental in developing the first set of criteria for identifying the “Least Developed Countries” (LDCs), and paved the way for making LDCs a major item of the United Nations agenda.
Jack I. Stone, an internationally renowned economist and a former Director of UNCTAD’s Research Division (1970-1981), died at his home in Maryland (United States) on 1st November 2018 at the age of 98.
For nearly half a century, Jack was widely and respectfully considered the “father” of the Least Developed Country (LDC) concept. His consistent rejection of the “exaggerated compliment” never changed the mind of those who always knew the reality of Jack’s legacy.
Jack Stone’s graduate studies began at the University of Chicago in the early 1940s, and in 1946, he joined the post-war US Military Government in Germany as an Economist and Statistician for the Marshall Plan Agency.
He returned to the United States in 1954 for further studies at Harvard University, and his eagerness to apply economic theory to the real world led him to embrace a career which, in his mind, had to be devoted to developing countries. Between 1959 and 1970, Jack was employed by the Puerto Rico Economic Development Agency, the US Department of State, the US Agency for International Development, and the OECD Secretariat.
His position as head of the Financial Policies Division of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD in Paris had already exposed him much to the work of UNCTAD when he left, in March 1970, to join UNCTAD as Director of the then Research Division.
At that time, the Research Division of UNCTAD was the entity responsible inter alia for the unborn concept of LDCs. UNCTAD Secretary-General Manuel Perez Guerrero had been requested by UNCTAD-2 (New Delhi 1968) to identify the countries which the first session of UNCTAD four years earlier had cited as “the least developed”.
Jack Stone immediately undertook this seminal work, and by the time an important UNCTAD expert group meeting on the subject took place in early 1971, he had developed the first identification methodology, and coordinated a range of country-specific research tasks which made it possible for the expert group to examine the particular features of LDC economies, understand the constraints which were hampering their growth, and sketch the elements of a possible global commitment to consider international support measures for LDCs.
By April 1971, six months before the LDC categorization was to be formally endorsed by the General Assembly, not only had 25 countries been identified as “least developed”, but the substantive and political basis for making LDCs a major item of the United Nations agenda had been established.
Many a time, Jack Stone shared with friends the view that, the real “father of LDCs” was UNCTAD Secretary-General Perez Guerrero, whose unstoppable will to realize Prebisch’s vision of an LDC categorization enabled UNCTAD to bring this to fruition.
Though his retirement from UNCTAD should have taken place in September 1980, Jack Stone continued to work through the summer of 1981 in order to be able to organize (by then under the leadership of UNCTAD Secretary-General Gamani Corea) the first United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries in Paris. Jack then pursued an active new career as an economic consultant well into his 80s and early 90s. In 1990, he assisted UNCTAD in organizing the Second UN Conference on LDCs. Later, Jack was also present in the third and fourth LDC conferences in 2001 and 2011, respectively.
In 2003, Jack Stone presented an important study on the “Silk Road” at the International Ministerial Conference of Landlocked and Transit Developing Countries in Almaty, Kazakhstan. In 2014, at the age of 93, he was a noted panelist during UNCTAD’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
