Herb Grubel

Herbert Gunter Grubel was born on 26 February 1934 in Frankfurt, Germany, where his parents, Elizabeth and Ernst Grubel, owned a small grocery store. He graduated in 1954 from a Gymnasium in the foothills of the Taunus mountains near Frankfurt and then completed a two-year management training programme.

In 1956 he emigrated to the United States. He earned a BA in business and economics from Rutgers University in 1958, financing his studies through a scholarship and part-time work, and went on to Yale University, where he received his PhD in economics in 1963.

Grubel taught full time at Yale (1961 to 1962), Stanford (1962 to 1963), the University of Chicago (1963 to 1966), where he counted Milton Friedman as a colleague, mentor and friend, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (1966 to 1971). In 1971 he worked as a senior policy analyst in the international division of the US Treasury. He moved to Canada in 1972 to join Simon Fraser University, where he taught until mandatory retirement in 1999 and supervised ten doctoral students. He held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, Nuffield College Oxford, the University of Nairobi, the University of Cape Town, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, the Free University of Berlin and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna.

His best known academic contribution is the Grubel-Lloyd index, set out with P. J. Lloyd in Intra-Industry Trade (1975), which measures how much a country both exports and imports goods in the same industry. He also wrote widely on international finance, the brain drain, monetary union and immigration, and published more than 30 books and monographs and more than 90 refereed articles.

From the mid-1970s he was a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. With Richard Schwindt he wrote The Real Cost of the B.C. Milk Board (1977), and with the institute's founder Michael Walker he examined unemployment insurance. He oversaw a 24-volume series on the service sector in Canada, helped develop the Economic Freedom of the World index, directed work on capital gains tax reform and later held the institute's David Sommerville Chair in Taxation and Finance.

In the 1993 federal election he won Capilano-Howe Sound in British Columbia for the Reform Party, pushing the former cabinet minister Mary Collins into third place. He was Reform's finance critic from 1995 to 1997, championed a flat tax and introduced private member's legislation for balanced budgets. He did not run again in 1997 and returned to Simon Fraser University.

In 1958 Grubel married Toni Andrews. Their son Eric was born in 1962, on the day of his first office hours at Stanford, and their daughter Heidi in 1965. The marriage ended in 1988. For the last 38 years of his life his partner was Dr. Helene Bertrand. He had five grandchildren. A keen skier, tennis player and hiker, he said his love of those sports kept him in Vancouver and Whistler despite offers elsewhere. Late in life he published a memoir.

Herbert Grubel died on 2 November 2026 at the age of 92. His death was announced in a family obituary in the Vancouver Sun and Province, by the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians and by the Fraser Institute, which published a tribute on 9 November describing him as technically brilliant, relentlessly curious and entirely fearless. No cause of death was made public.

The Grubel-Lloyd index remains a standard tool in international trade economics, and his work on intra-industry trade is cited as an influence on the research of Paul Krugman. The Fraser Institute credited him with giving it scholarly credibility in its early years and said his studies of marketing boards, unemployment insurance and capital gains tax helped shape Canadian policy debates. As an MP he brought an economist's voice to the fiscal arguments of the mid-1990s.