Raymond Vernon

Raymond Vernon (September 1, 1913 – August 26, 1999) was an American economist. He was a member of the group that developed the Marshall Plan after World War II and later played a role in the development of the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. He was the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, becoming emeritus on his retirement. His formulation of the Product life-cycle theory of US exports, first published in 1966, in turn influenced the behavior of companies.

Education Vernon was born Raymond Visotsky in New York; his parents were Russian Jewish immigrants and he and his siblings changed their family name to Vernon. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the City College of New York in 1933 and a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1941; all three of his siblings also earned doctorates. In the early 1950s he served as acting director of the Office of Economic Defense and Trade Policy, overseeing US trade with the Soviet bloc and encouraging those countries to trade with non-Communist countries.

In 1956–59, he headed the New York Metropolitan Region Study for the Harvard Kennedy School, forecasting the future development of the conurbation. Since he had also worked as a political scientist, one focus of his research was the relationship between states and companies: he pointed to the trend for that relationship to become relatively less important and that between companies and customers more so, as business became more international in the post-war world.

The Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management instituted the Raymond Vernon Prize in 1984 in honor of Vernon, who was the founder editor of their journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and renamed it the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award following his death.

Selected publications

(with Spar, Debora L.) (with Spar, Debora L.; Tobin, Glenn)