An economist from Biscay, he was born in Bilbao in 1909 and died in Madrid in 1983. He studied law at the University of Madrid, where he was head of the Federación Universitaria Escolar (FUE), a prominent left-wing student group. He also earned the title of Commercial Superintendent in Madrid.
In December 1930, he participated in the attempted military coup led in Jaca by Captains Galán and García Hernández, who were uted after being sentenced to death. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison, although he only served a few months thanks to the amnesty decreed in 1931.
He continued his training at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Berlin and the London School of Economics. In 1936, he obtained a professorship at the University of Santiago de Compostela. During the Civil War, he was appointed Chief of Staff to General Clement, and later joined the Central General Staff under General Vicente Rojo.
After the defeat of the Republicans, he went into exile and spent 15 years in various countries, working in a wide variety of professions: he was a shop assistant, journalist, book translator, and economist. He lived and worked in Buenos Aires, New York, London, and Paris. In London, he joined the Reuters news agency and later worked as an economist for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) (1951–1954).
During these years, he combined work with study and writing. He read extensively about economics and politics, and expressed his ideas and theories in numerous texts. In 1954, he returned to Spain and won the Chair of Political Economy at the University of Madrid. That same year, he assumed the position of director of the Central Bank's Research Center, a position he held until 1970, while he wrote a comprehensive treatise on Political Economy.
He was also a professor at the University of Salamanca (1959-1960) and, among other activities, served as "General Programmer" of an Advisory Group to the Government of Peru (1963-1964). Later, he held a chair of Law at the Complutense University of Madrid. His intense and multifaceted career is difficult to summarize due to its breadth and complexity.
In 1962, he participated in the famous Munich meeting, where he met other exiled compatriots. In 1982, he was appointed a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Featured work
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Philosophy of Economics (1942)
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Exchange control (1944)
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The Spanish economy in the next twenty years (1958)
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The Spanish Development Plan 1964-67 (1965)
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Annual Economic Studies of the Central Bank (1954-62 and 1964-69)
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Studies in Political Economy (1971), in eight volumes published
Bernardo Estorn s Lasa