Willy van Ryckeghem

Willy van Ryckeghem (Ghent, 1935) is a Belgian economist and statistician who devoted much of his career to Latin America. He studied economics in Ghent, Copenhagen and Paris and taught Business cycles at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Econometrics at Ghent University from 1968 to 1982. He was also visiting Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963-64 and Visiting Professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang in 1976.

His first experience in Latin America was in Argentina at the Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo (Conade) in 1964-65 where he worked under the auspices of the Harvard Development Advisory Service (DAS). He teamed with British economist Geoffrey Maynard to develop a stabilization model which was applied by the following administration during the period 1967-1970. After initial success in reducing the inflation rate from 22 to 7 percent without causing a major recession, the stabilization effort broke down in 1970.[1]

His next assignment was under the auspices of the so-called Berkeley-Group in Brazil at IPEA, where he constructed the country`s first input-output table for 1959. In addition, he formulated an exact method for determining the technology matrix in a situation with secondary products.

In 1972-73, he joined the University of Michigan team of economic advisors to the Planning Ministry of Morocco. This resulted in the publication of the collective book Employment Problems and Policies in Developing Countries-The Case of Morocco of which he was the editor in 1976.

In 1974, he became President of the Belgian Statistical Society. The same year, he published in the International Statistical Review an original method for estimating measurement errors in national account statistics. Also the same year, he was invited as keynote speaker at the Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the death of Adolphe Quetelet.

In 1976, he published together with Geoffrey Maynard A World of Inflation . In this book, they distanced themselves from the dominant monetarist thinking, and drew attention to structural factors in explaining differences in inflation rates between countries.<ref>Helmut Frisch : Inflation Theory 1963-79 : A Second Generation Survey, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol 15, no 4, december 1977, pp. 1289-1317 </ref

In 1982, he joined the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC where he led the Country Studies Division for seven years before becoming Deputy Manager of the Department of Economic and Social Development. In 1985 he presented a major study at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) meeting at Albuquerque on the Impact of the Latin American debt crisis on the countries in the region.

After his retirement in 1997, he was instrumental in the foundation in 2001 of the Brazilian non-profit organization Pro-teste, which has since become the largest consumer organization in Latin America. Between 1975 and 1978, he was the third President of Consumers International, following Colston Warne of Consumers Union and Peter Goldman of Which?. He was awarded the Order of Social Merit because of his work with the Belgian consumer movement.