Jan Tinbergen

Jan Tinbergen was a Dutch economist and physicist who, with Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch, was awarded the inaugural Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969 for having developed and applied dynamic models to the analysis of economic processes. He is one of the founding figures of econometrics and of modern macroeconomic policy modelling.

Born in The Hague in 1903 into an academically inclined family, Tinbergen studied mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, completing a 1929 doctoral thesis that explicitly linked economic problems to physics. He spent most of his early career at the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Netherlands, where from 1936 he built one of the first complete macroeconometric models of a national economy, and from 1945 to 1955 served as the founding director of the Netherlands Central Planning Bureau.

Tinbergen developed what is now called the Tinbergen Rule, the principle that to achieve a given number of independent policy targets a government needs at least the same number of independent policy instruments, and produced influential League of Nations studies in 1939 on business-cycle modelling that drew sharp methodological criticism from John Maynard Keynes and helped launch the modern econometric debate.

From the 1960s he turned increasingly to development economics, advising governments and the United Nations on planning in low-income countries, and chaired the UN Committee for Development Planning from 1965 to 1972. He was the older brother of the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, himself a 1973 Nobel laureate. He died in The Hague in 1994.

The name Jan is the Dutch, German, and Slavic form of John, from a Hebrew name meaning God is gracious; he wore it as a male given name.