18 September 2007 Distinguished Fellow of the New Zealand Association of Economists – Emeritus Professor Bruce Ross

Lincoln University's Emeritus Professor of Agricultural Economics Bruce Ross, foundation Vice-Chancellor of the University and a former Director-General of MAF, has made a deep contribution to New Zealand in education, economics and government administration.

The son of Otago University's late Emeritus Professor of History Angus Ross, Bruce was born in Dunedin in 1938 and attended Otago Boys' High School before doing his Intermediate Year at Otago University in 1957. He spent 1958 working on farms and arrived at what was then Canterbury Agricultural College in 1959 to begin studies for a Bachelor of Agricultural Science degree.

He was capped BAgrSc in 1962 and later completed a Master of Agricultural Science degree with First Class Honours in Economic Theory.

Bruce had a meteoric early career. It began in 1963 with lecturing in agricultural economics and farm management at the University of Malaya, then moved back to Lincoln in 1966 and a period at the Agricultural Economics Research Unit as a research economist. In 1970 it was on to Lincoln's Department of Agricultural Economics and a senior lectureship, then later that year, appointment to the chair of agricultural economics. At the age of 31 he was the College's youngest professor. In taking up this post he succeeded the foundation professor, the legendary Bryan Philpott, who had been his masters supervisor.

As an assistant to Philpott at the AERU, Bruce Ross had contributed work that featured prominently at New Zealand's first major economic planning summit of modern times, the National Development Conference of 1968. Lincoln's contributions to that conference (notably the "Lincoln model" an input-output model for projecting and planning the New Zealand economy) stamped the College for the first time as a national source of economic expertise in modern public affairs. Ross and Philpott authored a publication on the subject and it stands as a pioneering work of the period.

On the strength of his National Development Conference involvement he was offered the directorship of the Monetary and Economic Council but the Chair in Agricultural Economics at Lincoln, made vacant by Bryan Philpott's move to Wellington, became an option at the same time and it was natural that he should apply. He was appointed to the Chair in 1970 at the age of 31 and was at that stage the youngest professor at Lincoln.

In the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s he was closely involved with the Primary Production Committee of the National Research Advisory Council, serving a period as Committee Chairman and member of the National Research Advisory Council.

Other posts he has held include Chair of the National Committee on Agricultural Economics Research, member of the Economics Monitoring Group of the New Zealand Planning Council, national president of the Association of University Teachers, and Chair of the NZ Vice-Chancellors' Committee.

In 1983 Bruce Ross went to Paris for two years to head the Trade Analysis Division of the Agricultural Directorate of the OECD.

Back at Lincoln in 1985 he took up the reins as College Principal. He had been appointed to the position while overseas, succeeding Sir James Stewart. In the following years as College Principal he guided the institution to autonomy as a fully-fledged university. That was achieved in 1990 and he became Lincoln's first Vice-Chancellor. Many see this as his supreme achievement as it was against a tide of opposing proposals for the institution's future in the mid to late 1980s. He served in that role through to August 1996 when he was appointed Director-General of Agriculture and Forestry (subsequently MAF), a post he held until retirement at the end of April 2001.

In retirement in Wellington he has continued to be involved in public life and has served on important national committees such as the New Zealand Dairy Core Database Access Panel and the Biological Sciences Peer Review Panel within the Performance Based Research Fund Quality Assessment process.

Professor Ross is a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, awarded in the 2002 New Year Honours, for services to agriculture.

In June this year he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the New Zealand Association of Economists, recognising his many contributions over a career as a research economist, policy adviser and chief executive.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand