Helen Hughes


Helen Dolly Hughes was an Australian economist. She was Professor Emerita at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney. Hughes has been described as Australia's greatest female economist.

Biography

Early life

Born Helen Gintz into a Jewish family on 1 October 1928, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, she lived until 1939 in Česká Třebová. Hughes migrated with her parents to Melbourne in 1939, where she lived at North Brighton

Education

Helen attended Elsternwick Primary School and Mac.Robertson Girls' High School. She completed a BA from the University of Melbourne in 1949, winning the Marion Boothby Exhibition in British History in 1947 and 1st Place in General History in 1948. She received an MA from Melbourne University in 1951. Her dissertation on the history of the Australian steel industry was later published as her first book. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 1954.

Marriage and children

Hughes was married twice. She had two sons by her first marriage to Ian Hughes. In 1975 she married Graeme Dorrance, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC.

Death

Hughes died in Sydney from complications following surgery on 15 June 2013.

Career

Employment

In 1985 Hughes presented the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Boyer Lectures – 'Australia in a Developing World'.
In 1983 she was appointed by the Australian Foreign Minister Bill Hayden as deputy chair of the Jackson Committee, which reported on foreign aid for the Australian government.
She was also a member of the Australian Government's Fitzgerald Committee on Immigration: A Commitment to Australia.
Hughes was a member of the United Nations Committee for Development Planning from 1987 to 1993.
In 1980 Hughes appeared as a World Bank economist on a panel moderated by Robert McKenzie featuring Donald Rumsfeld, Jagdish Bhagwati, and Richard Deason as part of the Milton Friedman's PBS documentary Free to Choose.
Hughes' later research focused on economic development problems facing the Pacific Islands|Pacific Island nations and remote Indigenous Australian communities in Australia. Her last book, Lands of Shame, was about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 'Homelands' and reviewed demographic trends, law and order, land rights, joblessness and welfare, education, health, housing and governance, and assessed Commonwealth, State and Territory Indigenous policies. It was published by the Centre for Independent Studies.

Honours

Books

Over 40 years, Helen Hughes wrote, edited or co-authored books on employment, economic development, international trade and investment, Australian foreign policy and migration, and Australian Indigenous policy: