Maurice Wright obituary

My father, Maurice Wright, who has died aged 90, was part of a generation of academics who modernised thinking on the relationship between government and the civil service.

On joining the department of government at Manchester University in 1960 he focused on the role that the Treasury played in controlling public expenditure and how policymaking, particularly on economic issues, was coordinated in Whitehall among civil servants and ministers.

For several years in the 60s he worked with Harold Wilson’s Labour government, serving as an adviser to the Department of Economic Affairs, and in the 70s and 80s he lectured at the Civil Service College. His research was cited in government and Bank of England publications, and in many Commons select committee reports.

As well as UK and foreign students, he tutored a generation of junior civil servants and politicians (including the future president of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson) through postgraduate work. As former students assumed senior roles in nations that used the UK civil service model, Maurice would be invited for annual events in countries such as the Bahamas to provide updates on the latest Whitehall thinking.

As professor of government at Manchester from 1983, he shifted focus again to the developing global economies of Japan and Korea, writing and co-editing a series of works on the “tiger” economies of Asia at a time when there were virtually no British experts in this field. His research necessitated frequent trips to Japan and access to the powerful ministry of finance: a task Maurice’s charm and determination enabled him to succeed at, despite not knowing more than a few phrases of Japanese. His 2002 book Japan’s Fiscal Crisis is still in print.

From 1992 he was head of department. His first attempt at retirement, in 1998, was brief, as Manchester University lured him back two years later to run the Japan Centre, a language teaching and business service. His aptitude for organisation and rational approach to leading departments of academics flourished here, as it did at the Manchester University staff cricket team, where for several decades he acted as captain, opening bat, peace-maker and fixtures scheduler.

Maurice was born in Stanford-Le-Hope, Essex, the son of Mabel (nee Elgar) and William, who together ran pubs and working men’s clubs. A pupil at Southend high school for boys, he benefited from the huge postwar expansion in post-16 and higher education: he was the first in his family to stay on at school, and to attend university.

He studied politics and history at Nottingham, and then embarked on a PhD at Balliol College, Oxford, which was interrupted by national service. A research fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford followed, and he then took his first post at Manchester.

Maurice met his wife Pamela (nee Ehrlich) when both were undergraduates, and they married in 1959. She survives him, together with his sons, Martin and me, and five grandchildren.