The development of academic economics in Brazil received a major boost during the 1960s, when US institutions such as USAID and the Ford Foundation began to fund the first graduate programs in the field. An important moment occurred in 1973 with the creation of ANPEC, the national association...

Lionel Robbins' definition of economics helped to buttress the centrality that individual choice acquired after the Second World War. This, however, was an unintended consequence of his seminal work. Underlying his definition of economics, a novel approach to methodological individualism is...