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Gerald Karl Helleiner fonds
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Personal and biographical

This series begins with copies of Professor Helleiner's curriculum vitae and biographical information for various publications, including Who's Who in Economics. There are also files on honours and honorary degrees that he received, a few term papers from his graduate studies at Yale University, and appointment books for the years 1968 to 2009, except for 1972.

Gerald Karl Helleiner fonds

  • UTA 1361
  • Fonds
  • 1963-2009

Records of Gerry Helleiner, Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, and a pioneer in development economics, with special reference to Africa and Tanzania in particular. Includes personal and professional correspondence; his employment at Yale University and the University of Toronto, with some lecture notes; his involvement with numerous professional associations and his contracts with government and international agencies including the Commonwealth Secretariat, the North South Institute, the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) and the Intergovernmental Group of 24 on International Monetary Affairs (G24); grant applications and research notes; drafts of reports and manuscripts of his writings, with covering correspondence and notes; and addresses.

Helleiner, Gerald Karl

Manuscripts and publications

Professor Helleiner is the author or editor of 18 books, over 100 refereed articles and contributions to volumes, even more non-refereed publications, many book reviews, and some letters to the editor. This series does not contain a complete record of his output or copies of all of his manuscripts. Some files may contain a comprehensive record of the writing of a particular piece, including correspondence with colleagues (Professor Helleiner habitually ran his drafts by them) and/or publishers, contracts, notes and notebooks, drafts of manuscripts and comments on them, offprints, reviews, and royalty statements. Others may contain only the contract, perhaps a letter or two, or a review, but no manuscripts or offprints.

Some of Professor Helleiner's writing have been translated into other languages, including French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

For the three WIDER volumes that Professor Helleiner edited and for which he wrote introductions and/or chapters, see Series 6.

Professional associations and posts

The records in this series document Professor Helleiner’s association with and involvement in several dozen professional associations and organizations, including consulting contracts with governments and educational bodies. There are also files on many of the journals with which he was associated (he sat on the editorial boards of more than twenty at one time or another, one (World Development) for more than thirty years. Most of the latter contain his comments on papers he was asked to assess. There are also files on some conferences that he attended.

The files contain correspondence, memoranda, notes, minutes of meetings and proceedings of workshops, reports (many written by Helleiner), conference programmes and papers, the occasional interview, and selected newsletters and press clippings. The arrangement is by name of organization or event, filed alphabetically.

The most extensive files are on the following organizations, the binding thread being development economics: African Capacity Building Foundation and the African Economic Research Consortium; with officials and politicians of the Government of Canada and about the Canadian International Development Agency; the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and International Lawyers and Economists Against Poverty (ILEAP); the North South Institute, the Overseas Development Council (USA), and the North South Roundtable of the Society for International Development (UK); various activities relating to trade and investment in South Africa (including early opposition to it), and ongoing activities in Tanzania (see below); numerous bodies associated with the United Nations (especially UNICEF and UNCTAD); several universities (Dar es Salaam, Sussex, and the West Indies); the World Bank, and World Development.

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), founded in Ottawa in 1970, was mandated to support research on the reduction of global poverty and particularly research in (as well as for) developing countries.” It was initially headed by David Hopper, with whom Professor Helleiner worked on the creation of the North-South Institute in 1975-1976. He sat on the Board of the IDRC from 1985 to 1991.

ILEAP grew out of concerns Professor Helleiner raised in his Prebisch lecture at UNCTAD in December, 2000 about the lack of lawyers (and economists) “committed…to the specially defence of the rights of the poorest in the global economy’s legal system and the building of their capacity of defend themselves.” His call was taken up by Ron Daniels, dean of Law at the U of T, and others, with initial funding from the IDRC.

Professor Helleiner’s long association with Tanzania is well documented here, beginning in 1978 with the Government of Tanzania Task Force on Export Incentive Schemes, followed by the Tanzania Advisory Group (“Three Wise Men”) in 1981 and ending,
between 1994 and 2000, with the Group of Independent Advisors on Development Cooperation Issues Between Tanzania and its Aid Donors (which Helleiner chaired) and the associated Tanzania Advisory Strategy.

Additional correspondence on many of these organizations may be found filed under the names of the individual members in Series 2: Correspondence, an example being Roy Culpepper of the North-South Institute.

Of the more than twenty editorial boards on which Professor Helleiner sat, the most extensive files are for International Organization and WorldDevelopment. The files together contain primarily specially ng relating to his membership on editorial boards and/or his appraisals of papers presented to the respective journals. Some related correspondence may be found in ‘Series 2: Correspondence’ under the names of editorial board members.

Professor Helleiner’s involvement with the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-four on International Monetary Affairs (Group of 24 or G-24) is documented in Series 7 and with WIDER (World Institute for Development Economic Research) in Series 6.

In his curriculum vitae [B2010-0005/001(01) and /019(05)], Professor Helleiner provides lists of “Journal editorial boards”, “Other professional honours and posts”, and “sample selected research contracts and consultancies”. Researchers will find these lists very useful in gaining an understanding of the breadth of Professor Helleiner’s professional activities, while some indication of the depth of his involvement can be gleaned from his memoirs, Listening and learning [B2010-0005/079(02)].

Addresses

This series begins with a large volume of correspondence regarding invitaitons to give conference papers, lectures, and public addresses, and to lead or participate in seminars, workshops, and related events.

Referees

Professor Helleiner was frequently asked to review grant applications submitted to agencies as varied as the Canada Council, the Ford Foundation, and the Swedish Agency for Research Co-operation. He was also often asked to review manuscripts submitted to journals, book publishers, and government agencies. His colleagues also knew that he would provide careful commentary on drafts of articles, chapters of books, and reports they were writing.
This series documents these activities, and the files are grouped by the categories mentioned.
Additional information may also be found in other series, especially 2, 5, 6, and 7.

The files contain correspondence, grant applications, and drafts of manuscripts.

Correspondence

This series contains a voluminous exchange of letters between Professor Helleiner, his colleagues, students, friends, and other individuals. There are several systems of arrangement based, as closely as possible, on those devised by Professor Helleiner himself. The first system is letters of reference; the second is composed of files with titles ranging from

Employment

The records in this series document Professor Helleiner's employment at Yale University and the University of Toronto. Most of the material for the former relates to his being seconded to the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) at the University of Ibadan in 1962-1963.

The files for the University of Toronto document his employment record generally, his leave as director of the Economic Research Bureau, University College, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, (September, 1966 to June, 1968), his sabbatical leave at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and his committee work in the Department of Political Economy (from 1981, Economics). There are also files on planning projects and on the Centre for International Studies and other international programs. There is extensive correspondence with his undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students and students from other universities and countries, much of it contained in the individual files on graduate students that he supervised or on whose thesis committee he sat, as an internal or an external examiner. These files contain correspondence, progress and research reports, thesis committee reports, and references. The arrangement is alphabetical by name of student.

Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-four on International Monetary Affairs (G24)

“The G24…was founded in 1971 to provide more effective voice for developing countries in the international financial institutions….Early in its development, it established a research programme, funded by the UNDP [United Nations Development Program], administered by UNCTAD [United Nations Commission on Trade and Development], and run by Sidney Dell, as a backup for its efforts.” In the 1980s Dell approached Professor Helleiner to undertake research on behalf of the group. One of the latter’s projects was to plan, synthesize and summarize two of the G24’s research programme’s major projects – “one on the implications of the post-1971 (flexible) exchange rate regime for developing countries, and the other on the longer-term implications of the balance of payments crisis in developing countries which had been created by the severe exogenous shocks of the 1970s.” In the mid-1980s Professor Helleiner was able to find alternate funding through IDRC [International Development Research Commission] for the G24 research programme when it was about to run out of money. He also did most of the organizational work and editing (he also contributed a paper on African finance and debt) of a memorial volume in honour of Sidney Dell (who died in 1990) that appeared in 1995 as Poverty, prosperity and the world economy.

In 1991 Professor Helleiner agreed to replace Dell as the co-ordinator of the G24 research programme, in spite of being very busy with other projects, which he directed until 1999. He noted that “UNCTAD tended to see this program as a project of their own, and to see me as their employee…[as they] handled all of the G24 research programme’s administration…” Professor Helleiner’s duties included attending all the G24’s deputies’ and ministerial meetings and often its Bureau meetings as well. He also attended International Monetary Fund/World Bank meetings, most often in Washington but once every three years in other cities – Bangkok (1991), Madrid (1994) and Hong Kong (1997).

The research programme’s budget never exceeded $200,000 per year, but Professor Helleiner was able to attract further support from the governments of the Netherlands and Denmark and, later from individual G24 governments as well. Between 1992 and 1999, he commissioned over 80 papers, most of which were “published – in batches – in 11 volumes of a new UNCTAD series created solely for this purpose, entitled International monetary and financial issues for the 1990s. Further unpublished issue papers were done in response to specific requests from developing country Eds.” Unfortunately, most of the time these papers were ignored by the IMF and the World Bank staff which had their own permanent research units. Professor Helleiner believes that research programme’s greatest success was at the 1994 conference in Cartagena which was convened to review, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods conference that created the IMF, “the state of the international monetary and financial system from the standpoint of the interests of developing countries.

A subsequent innovation, resulting from a meeting in Antigua, Guatamela in August that year, was a decision to create “a G24 Technical Group to improve the relations between the research programme (and its coordinator), the G9 Executive Directors and the G24.” It met twice a year in G24 national capitals as well as Washington, the site of annual fall meetings. The first meeting in November 1994 was followed by specially ones in Abidjan (February 1995), Islamabad (March 1996), Margarita Island, Venezuela (March 1997), Algiers (March 1998), Colombo (March 1999). Professor Helleiner was responsible for the programmes and missed only the Venezuela meeting. Again, the capacity of the Technical Group’s research papers, even when right on topic, to influence G24 members efforts was limited by international political considerations.

This series contains correspondence, memoranda, notes, minutes of meetings, contracts and related legal documents, drafts of research papers, reports, and press coverage.

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