Marcel Alfons Gilbert van Meerhaeghe (Wetteren, 12 April 1921 – Ghent, 22 March 2014) was a Belgian economist, professor, publicist and columnist.

After the campaign of 1940 followed about seven months as a prisoner of war in a German camp (an intervention of King Leopold III resulted in the release of the ERM-students).

Between 1962 and 1969 he was co-opted as a member of the Conseil Central de l'Économie [fr], the umbrella institution of the Belgian federal social and economic dialogue.

Luc Versele [nl], since 2017 chairman of the Belgian bank Crelan, was an assistant of Professor van Meerhaeghe at Ghent University.

[16] A significant part of van Meerhaeghe's work belongs to what is commonly labelled as the American theory of public choice.

[17] He advocated great concern for a sound use of government means (struggle against profligacy) and was favourable towards Taxpayers Associations (USA, Sweden, Federal Republic of Germany) that facilitate the contacts between the authorities and the public opinion.

[27] M. van Meerhaeghe was one of the 165 German-speaking Professors of Economics who signed the Declaration « The Euro starts too early » (date: February 1998).

Already early in his career (in an article of 1947[29]) he took a position: he opposed the numerous publications that have no relation whatsoever with reality («struggle for life») and especially deplored the mania for addressing everything with mathematics.

362, June 1981, p. 591): "Professor van Meerhaeghe's book is a masterpiece of condensation:[31] a review of economic theory from Plato to Friedman, with the faults exposed, in 109 pages of text.

[33] As the most significant pieces of work we mention: Teaching international economics results in delivering lectures at a variety of universities and international conferences: Warsaw (1961), Geneva (Conference on science and technology in promoting the development of developing countries[50]), Pretoria (1964; Cultural Treaty between South-Africa, the Netherlands and Belgium[51]), Bratislava, Hull, Prague (1969 and 1989), Iasi (1971), Alvor,[52] Vienna (U.N.I.D.O.

[53]), Berlin, Uppsala, New York, Cracow (1977), Sofia, Naples, Florence, Moscow (1992), Jena, Orel, Valencia, Haigerloch,[54] Göteborg, Porto, Lisbon, Venice (2001), etc.

Some lectures were later published as an essay in their own right, e.g.: In order to understand economic problems, at all times the contemporary political, social, psychological and cultural factors have to be taken into account (the role of context: are the assumptions vindicated or wrongheaded ?).

Indeed, as history was his favoured subject area, since 1999 he was very active for the Annual Heilbronn Symposium in Economics and the Social Sciences[56] because it goes back to the old masters, i.e. the German classicists of the 19th (and even 18th) century.