Arndt's Story: The Life of an Australian Economist

€˜H.W. Arndt has been Australia€™s leading scholar of Asian economic development for over thirty years€™ - Former World Bank President James D Wolfensohn. The year of Heinz Wolfgang Arndt€™s birth, 1915, was not a good time for a German boy to be born. His country was soon to be defeated in a great war, his school years were shadowed by the rise of Hitler. Yet when Heinz€™s long-buried Jewish background led his academic father to lose his chair in chemistry and flee to Oxford, Heinz followed. As Heinz put it, the calamity of Hitler€™s rise to power led him to €˜the incredible good fortune of an Oxford education and a life spent in England and Australia.€™ This was a man of inexhaustible energy and optimism, who returned from months behind barbed wire interned in Canada to write a historical classic€”The Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties. He seized the opportunity of an unexpected job offer to set off with his young family for Sydney where he