John Richard Nicholas Stone

From the Nobel Foundation:

During the early 1950s, he made a number of trips abroad in connection with the national accounts. In 1950, he visited India with Simon Kuznets and J.B.D. Derksen to advise the National Income Committee on methods of estimation, and in 1952 he spent some time in Athens on a similar mission to the Ministry of Coordination.

In July of that same year, he was called to New York by the UN Statistical Office who wished to establish a standard system of national accounts and was convening a committee of experts for the purpose. He was chosen as chairman and work began. The weather was so hot that they decided to sleep by day and work by night. This proved very effective: their report was formulated, discussed and written in one month and was published by the UN with very little delay as A System of National Accounts and Supporting Tables (SNA).

In 1952, not many statisticians were familiar with national accounting and so there was no need for elaborate discussions outside the committee. The position was very different twelve years later, when the major revision of the SNA began. By that time most statistical offices were constructing national accounts and it was desirable to have a series of regional consultations if the new system was to prove acceptable. The consultative period lasted from 1964 to 1968 and the main task of explaining the revised version to committee after committee devolved on his friend Abraham Aidenoff of the UN Statistical Office. The new system appeared in 1968 as A System of National Accounts. Stone was responsible for writing the first four chapters and the remainder was the work of Aidenoff.

"Richard Stone: Biographical," Nobel Foundation (1984)

Nobel Laureate, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1984