Tinbergen, Jan

Tinbergen, Jan (1903-1994), Dutch economist and Nobel laureate, born in The Hague, and educated at the University of Leiden. He was a statistician (1929-1936) with the Central Bureau of Statistics and director of the Dutch government's central planning bureau (1945-1955). He became (1933) a Professor of Development Planning at the Netherlands School of Economics, Rotterdam, and he served (1936-1938) as an economic adviser to the League of Nations Secretariat. In the 1930s he was a pioneer in the new science of econometrics, the use of mathematical formulae based on statistics in solving economic problems. For this work he shared the first Nobel Prize for Economics with the Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch in 1969.