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 paper presents a survey of the complex relation between the production of primary commodities and economic growth throughout the history of economic thought. Some of the main topics investigated are: the apparent contrast between the theoretical advantages of natural wealth and the...

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 theory of economic development was an exception to Paul Samuelson's claim of being a "generalist" in economics. It was a hard subject to tackle analytically because of the intrinsic difficulty of some of the concepts involved, such as increasing returns and long-term economic evolution....

The paper shows how William Barber’s background as a development economist influenced his research agenda in the history of economic thought, in terms of the questions he asked and the way he approached them. The links between the history of economic theory and of policy-making are...

The "natural rate hypothesis" is usually ascribed to ideas put forward by M. Friedman and E. Phelps between 1966 and 1968. It postulates that changes in nominal aggregate demand affect aggregate output because agents cannot temporarily distinguish relative from general price movements when they...

The paper investigates Champernowne's 1936 attempt to sort out the debate between Pigou (1933) and Keynes (1936) about employment determination. Champernowne agreed with Keynes that workers can only bargain for a money-wage, but argued that, to the extent that workers' (adaptive) price...

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...

This paper provides an overview of Brazilian economists’ contributions to global economics since mid 20th century, from the perspective of economics as transnational science. The contributions are organized into three sections, after a methodological and historiographical introduction:...