Mikesell, Raymond F. 1913-2006
(Raymond Frech Mikesell)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 13, 1913, in Eaton, OH; died September 12, 2006, in Eugene, OR. Economist, educator, and author. Mikesell played an important role in the 1944 Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, conference that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). An Ohio State University graduate, he completed his B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1935 and his Ph.D. in 1939. Three years of service in the U.S. Naval Reserve was followed by several years with the U.S. government. Mikesell was an economist with the U.S. Treasury Department during the 1944 conference. He was instrumental in creating formulas that determined IMF members' financial contributions and voting rights. Later, however, Mikesell would declare that both the World Bank and the IMF had become useless bureaucracies and should be discontinued. After leaving the Treasury Department, he was an advisor in Cairo, Egypt, for a year. In the early 1950s, he was on the President's Foreign Economic Policy Commission and also the Council of Economic Advisors. His academic career included teaching at the University of Virginia from 1946 to 1957, and serving as professor and acting director of the Institute of International Studies and Overseas Administration at the University of Oregon. From 1960 to 1968, he was the institute's associate director. Mikesell retired from the University of Oregon in 1993. During a writing career that spanned five decades, Mikesell wrote, cowrote, or edited about fifty books. Among his titles are America's State in Foreign Investments (1959), The Economics of Foreign Aid (1968), New Patterns of World Mineral Development (1979), The Global Copper Industry: Problems and Prospects (1988), and Sustainable Development in Mineral Economics (1998).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2006, p. B15.

New York Times, September 15, 2006, p. C11.