Background
INGHAM, Alan was born in 1948 in Fleetwood, Lancashire, England.
INGHAM, Alan was born in 1948 in Fleetwood, Lancashire, England.
Bachelor of Science, Master of Science University London, 1969,1971.
Visiting Research Fellow, IRES, University Catholique de Louvain, 1977. Visiting Professor, J. West. Goethe University, Frankfurt, 1978. Visiting Association Professor, University British Columbia, Vancouver, 1981-1982.
Lector, University Southampton, England, since 1971.
My interests have included many topics in economics which have as theme a concern for public policy and a quantitative methodology. I have tried to take a broad approach to questions and not be limited by current models or approaches. A constant theme in my work has been the economics of natural resources.
Starting with considerations of optimal plans for depletion policies, in particular the consequences of using various models and social objectives for the possibility of existence of optimal plans and their nature, I have moved on to consider models with a greater degree of historical realism in terms of how natural resources entered into the production system. This led to consideration of learning by doing, and a vantage structure of production. My interests in this area have moved to an econometric analysis, in particular the demand for energy by the manufacturing sector in Britain, and it is hoped to be able to use the results of the empirical analysis in considering the employment consequences of various depletion and
resource pricing policies.
Another important interest has been whether the assumption of continuity of dynamic processes almost universally accepted by applied econometricians is a valid one. My paper on investment suggests that approximations to small-scale dynamic models may necessarily have to be discontinuous and that this can be supported at both an empirical and a theoretical level Other work related to discontinuity of the evolution of economic systems has been a study of the enclosure of common lands and the end of the open-field system in English agriculture.