Sir John Cowperthwaite (1915-2006)
Posted on 25 January 2006
Sir John Cowperthwaite, the man responsible for Hong Kong's economic miracle and the lifting of a whole country out of poverty, has died aged 90. Educated at the Merchiston Castle School, the University of St Andrews and then Christ's College Cambridge, he entered the Colonial Administrative Service in Hong Kong and spent three years in Sierra Leone (1942-45). For a decade from 1961, he was Financial Secretary to Hong Kong before becoming an adviser to Jardin Fleming & Co. He retired to St Andrews and enjoyed playing golf at the Royal & Ancient Golf Club.
The significance of Cowperthwaite cannot be underestimated. As Milton Friedman has explained:
The colonial office in Britain happened to send John Cowperthwaite to Hong Kong to serve as its financial secretary. Cowperthwaite was a Scotsman and very much a disciple of Adam Smith. At the time, while Britain was moving to a socialist and welfare state, Cowperthwaite insisted that Hong Kong practice laissez-faire. He refused to impose any tariffs. He insisted on keeping taxes down.
I first visited Hong Kong in 1955, shortly after the initial inflow of refugees. It was a miserable place for most of its inhabitants. The temporary dwellings that the government had thrown up to house the refugees were one-room cells in a multistory building that was open in the front: one family, one room. The fact that people would accept such miserable living quarters testified to the intensity of their desire to leave Red China.
I met Cowperthwaite in 1963 on my next visit to Hong Kong. I remember asking him about the paucity of statistics. He answered, "If I let them compute those statistics, they'll want to use them for planning." How wise!
Nonetheless, there are some statistics, and in 1960, the earliest date for which I have been able to get them, the average per capita income in Hong Kong was 28 percent of that in Great Britain; by 1996, it had risen to 137 percent of that in Britain. In short, from 1960 to 1996, Hong Kong's per capita income rose from about one-quarter of Britain’s to more than a third larger than Britain's. It's easy to state these figures. It is more difficult to realize their significance. Compare Britain - the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set - with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no resources except for a great harbor. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one-third higher than that enjoyed by the residents of its former mother country.
Sir John was a supportive friend of the Globalisation Institute. We will miss him.