Paul Mosley obituary

My friend Paul Mosley, who has died aged 79, was a scholar of development economics and a leading advocate for making foreign aid more effective. He held positions in economics and development studies departments from 1971 at universities including Strathclyde, Bath, Manchester and Reading. His last post was as professor of economics at Sheffield University, from where he retired in 2020. Along with his academic roles, Paul worked as an economist for the UK’s Overseas Development Administration (ODA) early in his career and later as an adviser to United Nations agencies. Behind all of his life and work was an energetic desire to “make the world a better place”. His first focused on African economic history, the subject of his PhD, which was later published as a book, The Settler Economies (1983). Witnessing the low living standards in rural Kenya and Zimbabwe during his research led him to concentrate on policy, endeavouring to directly address the situations he had seen. In the 1980s he played a key role at a thinktank, the Independent Group on British Aid (IGBA), and from 1992 until 1998 worked as a trustee for the charity ActionAid. Among his best known publications were Foreign