Henry Owen, economic policy expert, dies

Henry Owen, a onetime State Department official who organized economic summits in the 1970s and helped shape international economic policies, died Nov. 5 at Georgetown University Hospital. He was 91.

He lived in Washington and died after a heart attack, his son Christopher Owen said.

All but unknown to the general public, Owen exerted a quietly powerful influence on global economic thinking, first at the State Department and later at the Brookings Institution and as an ambassador-at-large for President Jimmy Carter.

He merged the fields of diplomacy and international finance to promote development and cooperative efforts around the world. Under Carter, Owen organized international economic summits in 1978, 1979 and 1980 that took place in the shadow of earlier oil embargoes and growing unrest in the Islamic world. Trade agreements and expansionary economic policies emerged from those meetings.

Owen joined the State Department at the end of World War II and worked on developing economic policies for Japan. He maintained a lifelong interest in global trade economic cooperation.

Along with banker David Rockefeller and scholar-diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, Owen was a principal founder in 1973 of the Trilateral Commission, an influential group of nongovernmental international leaders promoting cooperation among Europe, North America and Asia.