Adam Smith is commonly referred to as one of the first who thought of foreign trade in terms of an international division of labour, whereby each country specialises in the production of certain goods. It is argued that he made a strong case for foreign trade on this basis. In this article, I...

Chapter Six and its Appendix deal in some detail with the way Keynes is defining income, savings and investment in the General Theory while the appendix to Chapter 6 goes into detail on user cost. His concept of user cost at one point sparked a certain amount of controversy among Keynesians but...

Chapters 8, 9 and 10 set out Keynes' theory of consumer behavior. Chapter 8 is entitled The Propensity to Consume: I. The Objective Factors, Chapter 9 is The Propensity to Consume: II. The Subjective Factors, and Chapter 10 is The Marginal Propensity to Consume and the Multiplier. Contrary to...

In Chapter 3 of the General Theory, Keynes sketches out what he calls the essence of the General Theory of Employment. He introduces the Keynesian expenditure-based model, the aggregate demand curve and also his aggregate supply function, a concept which spawned much debate among Post-Keynesian...

In Chapter 4 of the General Theory, Keynes discusses the units of measurement he will be using in the remainder of the book, in particular his reason for measuring in nominal rather than real terms, objection to aggregate measures of real output and physical capital stock, and his concept of...

Chapter 2 is one of the most important chapters in the General Theory. Not only does it set out Keynes' disagreements with key elements of the classical model, it lays out his own model of the working of the labour market, which underlies the analysis in the remainder of the General Theory. The...

This paper puts John Maynard Keynes' "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" into its historical context, both in terms of economic history and in terms of the history of economics. It discusses the post-World War I period as background to the General Theory, looks at the...

It is well known that one of the features of Public Choice, political realism, in Italy is embedded in a time-honored tradition going back to Machiavelli, and perpetuated by G. Mosca and Pareto in their political and sociological writings. The scientific spirit, which in their era led to the...

This essay is a commented bibliographic inventory of the references in the economic thought concerning the affection and the family, from Adam Smith to the authors that recently have formalized models toward this subject. Within the commented authors are: Smith, Malthus, Sade, Fourier, J.S....