Williamson attended the London College of Economics, graduating with a level in economics in 1951. After finishing two years of obligatory navy service, he entered the graduate faculty at Princeton, the place he acquired his Ph.D. in 1963.
Though he had frequent affords from Oxford and Cambridge, significantly later in his profession, Mr. Williamson was interested in the type of inventive analysis that was performed at among the new universities known as flat glass, after its modernist structure.
He joined York College in 1963, the yr of its founding, after which taught on the College of Warwick, based in 1965. However he was more and more interested in policy-making. In 1968 he took a job as an adviser to the British Treasury, the place he labored on financial relations with the European Financial Group, and later moved to Washington to work on the Worldwide Financial Fund.
Whereas on the IMF he met Denise Rausch, a Brazilian economist. They married in 1974.
Alongside together with his daughter and spouse, Mr. Williamson is survived by two sons, Andre and Daniel; two sisters, Chris Evans and Wyn Jones; and 7 grandchildren.
The Williamsons spent the late Seventies in Brazil, the place he labored for a analysis establishment and taught at a Catholic college. Ms.Williamson taught her husband Portuguese, which she thought of her best success, having struggled with international languages in class.
They returned to Washington in 1981, when economist C. Fred Bergsten assumed Mr. Williamson to be the primary worker of the newly based Institute for Worldwide Economics, later renamed the Peterson Institute for Worldwide Economics. He remained there till his retirement in 2012. (In 1996 he took a depart of absence from the institute to hitch the World Financial institution, the place his spouse labored, regardless that he left after solely three years, pissed off by the forms of the financial institution.)
Till he invented the Washington Consensus, Mr. Williamson was greatest identified for his work on alternate charges. He was a passionate advocate for a center floor between the rigidity of fastened charges – significantly for growing economies – and the chaos of floating charges, which he believed would additionally put developed economies on the mercy of worldwide monetary markets.
