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The study of Economics has been a part of McMaster since the university’s beginnings. McMaster was incorporated in 1887 as a Baptist institution of learning, located in Toronto. At that time, courses were offered in "Civil Polity" and the reading lists included works by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons and Walter Bagehot. By the time of McMaster’s relocation to Hamilton in 1930, the department of Political Economy had been well established. The 1960s saw the department of Political Economy become three separate entities: the Faculty of Commerce, and the departments of Economics and Political Science.
Professors in the department’s early years included Abraham Lincoln McCrimmon (subsequently Chancellor of McMaster), Duncan Alexander MacGibbon (who later became Commissioner for the Alberta government on banking and credit, a member of the Canadian Board of Grain Commissioners and a Canadian delegate to the Imperial Conference, London, in 1930), Kenneth Wiffen Taylor (who went on to great distinction in the public service of Canada and after whom the building that houses today’s department of Economics is named) and William Burton Hurd (O.B.E., F.R.S.C. and president of the Canadian Political Economy Association). Among the current members of the department is McMaster President and Vice-Chancellor Peter George.
Graduates of McMaster’s Economics program include Myron Scholes (B.A. ‘62), co-winner of the 1997 Nobel prize in Economics, Harold Innis (B.A. ‘16), noted Canadian economic historian who became president of the American Economics Association, Marianne Ferber (B.A. ‘44), prominent academic and Professor Emerita (Economics) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Paul House (B.A. ‘69), President and C.O.O. of Tim Hortons, former Government of Canada cabinet minister Tony Valeri (B.A. ‘76) and Madhukar Shumshere Rana (M.A. ‘67), former Minister of Finance of Nepal.
A century ago, the department’s instructional offerings were limited to one course in each of years Three and Four of the undergraduate degree. The department today offers over 120 sections of about 70 undergraduate and graduate courses, covering a wide-ranging field of topics in Economics. Degrees are awarded at the Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral levels. The department’s most recent innovation, introduced in the Fall of 2005, is a Masters program in Economic Policy.
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