My friend Hugh Corbet, who has died aged 88, was an expert in trade strategy and an advocate of free trade who advised various governments around the world, including those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
As co-founder and head of the Trade Policy Research Centre (TPRC) thinktank in London from 1968 to 1989, he quickly became a sought-after adviser to politicians, and by 1979 was also working as a consultant on trade policy to the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris and as a special trade adviser to the Conservative party.
He worked closely with Cecil Parkinson when he was secretary of state for trade and industry, and also collaborated with the Reagan administration, contributing to the intellectual groundwork for what would become the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services, a global deal that promoted the liberalisation of trade.
Born in Perth, Australia, to John Corbet, an engineer, and Freida (nee Sherwood), Hugh was educated at Prince Alfred college, Adelaide, and the University of Adelaide, where he began a degree in economics that he completed at Keele University after moving to the UK in 1961.
He subsequently worked in a variety of jobs in the UK, including for a firm of stockbrokers, as a parliamentary researcher and as a journalist, rising to be an economics writer for Thomson regional newspapers before becoming a specialist writer on international economic affairs on the Times in 1965. Three years later he left the Times to set up the TPRC with the Canadian economist Harry G Johnson.
Hugh left the TPRC in 1989 to work in Washington DC, where he was a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Brookings Institution, then director of the trade policy programme at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University from 1993 to 1997.
In 1998 he became president of the Cordell Hull Institute in Washington DC, promoting a strategic approach to the liberalisation of international trade and investment based on free-trade principles, private enterprise and open competition. Although he scaled down his working hours in later years, he continued to work for the institute until his death.
Hugh married Rosalind Bevan in 1960; they divorced in 1978. He is survived by their children, Zoe and Guy, three grandchildren, Jessica, Max and Dominic, a great-grandson, Jasper, and his brother, Tony.
