Paul Wonnacott was also the author of two textbooks, and served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W.
His major service for the U.S. Government was on the Council of Economic Advisers where he was a senior staff economist (1968-70), working primarily on international finance.
When Free Trade Between The United States And Canada: The Potential Economic Effects appeared, it attracted considerable attention in the Canadian press, including major articles in the Financial Post, the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail.
A study for the Brookings Institution and Institute for Research on Public Policy (Ottawa) observed that, at the time the Wonnacott book was published, the “most glaring deficiency [of standard international economics was] the failure to incorporate economies of scale and imperfectly competitive markets, which, thanks to the work of several scholars—notably Harry C. Eastman and Styfan Stykolt,[8] Ronald J. Wonnacott and Paul Wonnacott, and Richard G. Harris and David Cox[9]—is now clearly understood to be the salient feature of secondary manufacturing in Canada.”[10] Max Corden judged the Wonnacotts' book “an outstanding trade-liberalization study—probably one of the most impressive contributions to applied international economics in recent years.”[11] During the 1960s and 1970s, widely accepted Keynesian theory was under vigorous attack from Milton Friedman and other monetarists.
In his intermediate macroeconomics text, which first appeared in 1974,[12] Wonnacott pointed out the strengths and problems with each of these viewpoints, and he attempted to explain each in a manner that the proponents would recognize.