Max Corden, one of Australia’s most influential economists and the intellectual thought leader behind cutting tariff protection in the 1970s and ’80s to help deliver today’s economic prosperity, has died. He was 96.

A giant of the economics profession and renowned internationally, Professor Corden was born in 1927 into a prosperous German-Jewish family in Breslau, (now Wrocław) in western Poland, before narrowly escaping Hitler’s regime to Britain and ultimately settling in Melbourne in 1939 aged around 11.