Alfred Franz (1939 – 2021)
With deep regret the IIOA announces that Alfred Franz, one of the founding members of our Association, passed away on 14 January 2021. Alfred Franz was born in 1939 in Upper Austria. He studied law at the University of Vienna, Austria. After his studies he became a staff member of the Austria Central Statistical Office (today: Statistics Austria) and was in charge of the development of official national accounts statistics in Austria. He can be considered a true pioneer in the field of Input-Output statistics: He was engaged in the compilation of the first Input-Output tables for Austria for the reference years 1961 and 1964 and participated in the compilation of the first regional table in Austria for Styria. One of the main projects in his area as head of the National Accounts Department was the implementation of Supply and Use tables as backbones of national accounts.
He had also teaching obligations at the Technical University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck and from 1989 to 2009 he was Honorary Professor of Economic and Social Statistics at the University of Vienna. He also organised international conferences on Input-Output statistics.
His scientific interests were very broad but always strongly related to the conceptual basis of national accounts and its systems approach. He made important conceptual contributions to Regional Accounts, Tourism Economic Accounts, Environmental Accounts, Gender Accounting, Hidden Economy, or International Purchasing Power Parities. Many of these concepts were developed for international organisations. Even after his retirement in 2002 he carried out studies for the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, Eurostat and some other organisations. In all phases of his professional career Alfred Franz put a lot of emphasis on the fundamental basics of official statistics such as statistical units and statistical classifications. Numerous publications and conference contributions document the broad variety of his intellectual interests and output. (For more information see his homepage: http://www.vgr.cc/cms/)
We lost a widely recognised international expert in official statistics and a true scientist who was aware that “concepts matter”. Many of us also lost a good friend.
Norbert Rainer