Nicholas Kaldor, 78, Tax Economist, Dies

CAMBRIDGE, England — Nicholas Kaldor, the Hungarian-born economist who advised developing nations on taxation and became the architect of British taxation policies in the Labor governments of the 1960s and 1970s, has died here, his family said Thursday. He was 78.

Lord Kaldor, who died Tuesday of undisclosed causes, made a major contribution to economic theory on wealth and income distribution. By his late years, he had become one of the most outspoken academic critics of the monetarist policies of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

He built his reputation in a series of taxation reports in the 1950s and 1960s for countries including India, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Mexico, Turkey, Ghana, Australia and Iran and was appointed special adviser to the British finance minister when Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labor Party took power in 1964.

The author of many books, he was born in Budapest in 1908 and moved from Hungary to London in 1927 to study at the London School of Economics. Kaldor was given a life peerage by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974.