Michael Ward (1939 – 2008) was a British economist and statistician who contributed significantly to the evolution of the international statistical system in the post-war period.
At both at Cambridge and Sussex he worked with some of the foremost development economists of the time, including Richard Jolly, Graham Pyatt, Dudley Seers, and Richard Stone—people who, as Ward observed in his book Quantifying the World, "abhorred any suggestion that facts be fit to theory and spent their lives building theory around observed facts and creating frameworks that more usefully depicted how the real world worked."
In 1975, between the UNESCO assignments and the post at Sussex University, he worked for a few months as consultant for OECD on the measurement of capital.
After retirement, Ward's expertise and advice continued to be sought by international agencies as well as by national statistical offices including those of China and India.
His contributions to edited volumes included the Encyclopædia Britannica (on economic forecasting and international comparisons); Indicator Systems for Political, Economic and Social Analysis (Taylor); Development in small countries (Selwyn); Development Planning in Developing Countries (OECD); Surveys and Social Statistics (Bulmer); International Comparisons (Heston and Summers); Problems and Issues in International Comparisons (Salazar-Camillo and Rao); National Accounts in Developing Countries (OECD); 1999 ISI Conference (Helsinki), Collected Papers; 2001 ISI Conference (Seoul), Collected Papers; Statistics and Human Rights (IAOS Montreux, 2000), Selected Papers.