Sir Alan Arthur Walters was Vice Chairman and Director of AIG Trading Group and Chief Economic Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1981-1983, 1989). He studied statistics at University College Leicester, then went to Nuffield College, Oxford where he took an MA in economics. On leaving Nuffield in 1951 he took up a post to teach statistics at Birmingham University, later becoming professor of econometrics and statistics there in the early 1960s. After serving as a professor at the London School of Economics from 1967 to 1976, where he was Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of Economics, Walters became an economic adviser to the World Bank and Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University.