On November 29, 2024, emeritus professor Peter Cornelisse passed away at the age of 86. Cornelisse has been important to Erasmus University Rotterdam in various capacities. Until 2019, well after his retirement, he chaired numerous doctoral committees and organised conferences and symposia, in recent years also and especially in memory of the work of Jan Tinbergen, the first Dutch winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
From 1975 to 1988, Peter Cornelisse was Professor of development economics and from 1988 until his retirement in 2003, Professor of public finance at Erasmus School of Economics. From 2007 to 2023, he was Emeritus Professor at Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
After successfully completing his studies at the Netherlands School of Economics (NEH, the predecessor of Erasmus School of Economics and Erasmus University Rotterdam), he began his academic career in 1962, among other things as an assistant to Jan Tinbergen. In the years that followed, he worked successively as a consultant and senior lecturer at the State Planning Organisation in Ankara, Turkey, and as senior lecturer at the Institut de Développement Economique et de Planification in Dakar, Senegal. In 1973, he obtained his doctorate cum laude, also at the NEH. Cornelisse's ideas are most clearly expressed in his “Exchange and Development”, written together with Erik Thorbecke and published in 2010. Cornelisse advocated exchange, for trade, in word and writing. However, in his view, price interventions were also justified in order to prevent unbridled capitalism. He advocated education even more emphatically, especially for girls and women. For Cornelisse, both were essential for the development of countries, their economies and their inhabitants.
In 2015, Cornelisse, together with alumnus and former politician Jan Pronk, conceived the plan to ensure that their mentor Jan Tinbergen would receive a full-fledged biography. With the support of Erasmus School of Economics, postdoctoral researcher Erwin Dekker was able to start writing his book about the first Nobel Prize winner in Economics in early 2017. Cornelisse remained closely involved in the writing process in the following years, as a listening ear, with sober and clear advice about the importance and limits of Tinbergen's work and lively stories about his time as Tinbergen's liaison at the Turkish State Planning Organisation in the sixties. It resulted in the publication of the book "Jan Tinbergen and the rise of economic expertise " in 2021. For biographer Erwin Dekker, Peter Cornelisse was an incredible pillar of support. ‘His patience and trust led to insights into Tinbergen’s work and gave me the courage to develop a more critical perspective,’ Dekker said in the acknowledgements of his book.
