This book tells the story of a largely forgotten enterprise: that of the International Scientific Committee on Price History. If this endeavour can nevertheless still be of interest today, it is not only because failures offer insights into social dynamics as well as successes do ; nor is it...

Les ingénieurs économistes français avaient accueilli avec beaucoup de réticences l’œuvre de Walras. Ils ne pensaient pas que l’emploi des mathématiques puisse constituer une méthode normale même en économie politique pure. Progressivement leurs réticences s’estompèrent quand...

The way the expresssion "applied economics" was employed changed deeply from one author to another. In this article we examine the meaning of this concept in Leon Walras' and Wassily Leontief's works regarding mathematical models of general interdependence and general equilibrium. It appears...

Input-output analysis was a particular way of state intervention. Its success was due to the connection of a theory to a model and to an instrument. It was a tool for science and for action. This articulation of an explanatory, a descriptive and a prescriptive dimension may be understood as an...

From the 1930s, Leontief defended the validity of input-output analysis on the basis of a very specific epistemology: operationalism. Operationalism was not proper to Leontief but it was a common epistemological reference from the 1930s to the 1950s –especially about the status of scientific...

Ragnar Frisch wrote in 1933 that "The complete macrodynamic problem, as I conceive of it, consists in describing as realistically as possible the kind of relations that exist between the various magnitudes in the Tableau Economique ., and from the nature of these relations to explain the...

The present study analyzes the effect of the public investment on the economic growth in Cameroon. It is a question of appreciating the direct effect of the public investment on the growth on the one hand, and of highlighting the indirect effect of this last on the economic growth through...

From as early as the 1950s, J.C. Gardin's work spanned both archaeology and the emerging automation of numerical computation and documentation. In 1961, with P. Garelli, he published the first automated application of graph theory to historical materials, working from Assyrian cuneiform tablets...

We analyze a series of macroeconometric models developed in the years of high theory by Marschak, Frisch and Leontief. These models share an explanation of growth, cycles and fluctuations (“economic change”) based on the analysis of the circulation of capital goods among producers. They...

This is the introductive chapter to the book "Wassily Leontief and Economics", published in February 2019 (ENS editions). Economists produce their statements and forecasts from devices articulating abstract theories with mathematical models and statistical instruments of measurement. What is the...