Peter Doyle

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Being born into a white farming family in Rhodesia’s apartheid era affected people in different ways. In Peter Doyle’s case, it provided him with a lifelong respect and affection for African people and African Americans; and a lifelong wish to correct current and past injustices.Perhaps it also contributed to Peter dedicating his gift of huge intellect to becoming one of his generation’s great challengers of the global institutions of economic policy.Being economic adviser to a king in your early 20s is a decent start to any career.After graduating from University College Oxford, Peter was posted by the UK’s Overseas Development Institute to a junior government position in Swaziland, where the king soon stumbled upon his analytical skills, used him as his A-level economics tutor, and they consulted regularly during Peter’s 2-year placement.His initial interest was in microeconomics as a way to “help disadvantaged people in developing countries,” but at the ODI in Africa he “discovered there how their fortunes were affected much more powerfully by macroeconomics than microeconomics. So I switched to macro.”Peter was then recruited to work for now Governor Andrew Bailey on debt and development issues at the Bank of England. The early 1990s saw Peter drawn to the economic challenges related to the collapse of the Soviet Union; but Peter soon realised the Old Lady was but a backwater in such matters; he left for Washington DC, also because he had been inspired by IMF staff who he’d seen in action in Swaziland.In some ways the IMF and Peter were very well matched and he rose qui…