The work of Raúl Prebisch is typically summarized by two of his important contributions to development economics: the center-periphery paradigm together with his diagnosis of Latin America's development struggles. Recent investigations have, however, shed light on the nature of Prebisch's early...

Paul Samuelson's famous 1948 "factor price equalization theorem" was his main contribution to international trade theory. He demonstrated conditions under which trade in goods only would lead to full equalization of the remuneration of productive factors across countries. In practice, general...

The origins of "capital fundamentalism' - the notion that physical capital accumulation is the primary determinant of economic growth - have been often ascribed to H arrod's and Domar's proposition that the rate of growth is the product of the saving rate and of the output-capital ratio. I t is...

This paper, based on previously untapped archival sources, offers an assessment of the life and thought of Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a pioneer of development economics and one of the first articulators of both the "Big Push" and "balanced growth" theories. In addition to documenting the early life...

In the late 1970s Paul Samuelson drafted the outline of a paper, never published, with a critical assessment of the theoretical innovations of postwar development economics. He found the subject essentially intractable. The present paper discusses how that assessment fits in Samuelson's...

Lewis argued that his 1954 model of economic development in a dual economy was based on the classical framework originally advanced by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. The present paper provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis adopted and adapted classical concepts such as...

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the "growthmen" of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in macroeconomics. The history of MIT growth economics is traced from Solow's seminal neoclassical...

The aim of this paper is to explain the process of diversification of normative economics by presenting the work of two authors: Tibor Scitovsky [1910-2002] and Amartya Sen [1933-]. While these two authors first contributed to traditional welfare analysis from within, they were subsequently...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans - social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th century Scots...

Commerce changes the production of wealth in a society as well as its ethics. What is appropriate in a non-commercial society is not necessarily appropriate in a commercial one. Adam Smith criticizes Stoic self-command in commercial societies, rather than embracing it, as is often suggested. He...