Colin Grant Clark was born on 2 November 1905 in London. He was educated at Winchester College and Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He graduated first in chemistry and then in economics. He described himself as "an academic economist with a considerable international reputation". He was a prodigious author of economic texts, articles and papers. He worked at several British universities before being appointed Lecturer in Statistics at Cambridge University in 1931, where he worked with economist John Maynard Keynes.

During visits to Australia and New Zealand in 1937 and 1938, Clark accepted a position from then-Queensland Premier William Forgan Smith to advise the Queensland Government on economic matters up until 1953. Following his work with the government, he returned to Oxford as the Director of the Institute of Agricultural Economics, then becoming a fellow at Monash University after retiring from Oxford in 1969. He finally returned to Queensland in 1978, taking up a position as an honorary research consultant in economics at the University of Queensland, where he remained until his passing in 1989. His work in national income accounting was fundamental to the development of macroeconomics, including pioneering the use of gross national product. In 1984, he was named by the World Bank as one of the "pioneers of development", and in 1987, was jointly the first recipient of the Distinguished Fellow awards presented by the Economic Society of Australia. He received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Queensland in 1985. His memory is honoured through a building bearing his name on the St Lucia campus, as well as the annual Colin Clark Memorial Lecture at the University of Queensland.