In Memoriam

Michael John Sharpston (1944-2018)

Michael was born in Cambridge, England, in August 1944. When he was six, the family moved to Tanganyika (modern–day Tanzania), where Michael spent four happy years: the start of his fascination with, and devotion to, developing countries.

Back in the UK, Michael won a scholarship to Winchester College and thence to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. Over the vacations, he went to Brazil, where the family was spending another four-year stint. Michael read economics and, on graduating, joined the British Civil Service. From there he was recruited by the Harvard Development Advisory Service and went back to Africa – to Ghana, where he lived for three years and loved seeing Africa anew as an adult. He returned to the UK as a research officer at Oxford followed by two years at Cambridge as a lecturer in the Faculty of Economics. He joined the World Bank staff in 1972. He travelled widely, researched, thought, came up with new and provoking solutions. His seminal paper on health economics was typical of his output: multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, academically rigorous, joining up the dots in a way that hadn’t been thought of (let alone done) before. See A Health Policy for Developing Countries http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/524911468183869692/A-health-policy-for-developing-countries

In April Michael was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma (bile ducts). Sadly, he passed away on May 31st, 2018 in Washington D.C.

Ines Garcia