From uncertainty to macroeconomics and back:#

An interview with Jacques Drèze
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by
Omar Licandro and Pierre Dehez

Licandro: Different stories were told at the time I was student at the University of Louvain concerning the reasons that motivated you to study economics: your banking experience, your contacts with unions, your studies at the University of Liege. Were these initial times important for your intellectual development? What have you learned from them and how they have influenced your research?

Drèze: When I graduated from high school in 1946, I enrolled for a degree in philosophy at Louvain. The plan did not materialise, due to the accidental death of my older brother a few weeks before commencement. This was a very hard blow for my parents, and I decided to stay with them, go to work for my father, serving as a secretary, chauffeur and assistant – but mostly keeping him company and providing the stimulation of introducing me to his trade. At the same time, I enrolled for a degree in business and economics at the nearby University of Liege. My father was a small-town banker, in a one-industry town: textiles and textile machinery. His business was very modest. But these were the years of post-war reconstruction, and my father’s customers faced all sorts of new financial problems. As I had no fixed duties at the bank, and had progressively acquired a basic understanding of finance, I went on a number of special assignments that were very instructive – like finding in London counterparts for forward transactions on foreign currencies, negotiating in Finland barter agreements to enable a local firm to pay for textile machinery with pig iron, raising equity capital for a small family-owned firm, or even serving as mediator for a labour conflict... Read the interview

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