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 highlighted,...

Paul Samuelson was attracted to the economic dynamics of South American countries because of the links between economic performance and political factors. He discussed the influence of 'populist democracy' on Argentina's relative stagnation, which, he argued in the 1970s and early 1980s, served...

The paper provides an account of Don Patinkin's long-time search for an explanation of the notions of an aggregate demand constraint and unemployment under the assumption of a perfectly competitive goods market. It is argued that Patinkin's quest is reflected on the development of the concept of...

The paper brings to light an early contribution to the cash-in-advance literature made by the Brazilian economist Mario Henrique Simonsen (1935-1997) in an article written in Portuguese as far back as 1964. Simonsen explicitly introduced the cash-in-advance constraint as an inequality in a...

Erik Lindahl's approach to macroeconomics focused on the non-neutrality of monetary policy (in the short and the long run) and on the denial of the existence of natural rates of interest and unemployment. From the 1920s until his death in 1960, Lindahl advocated the use of norms for monetary...

This article traces some of the historical roots of current debates about secular economic stagnation, involving L. Summers, R. Gordon, and others. We focus on early contributions by Alvin Hansen and John A. Hobson. Although Hansen has been the main influence on the secular stagnation...

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...

The paper investigates Celso Furtado's role in the controversy between structuralists and monetarists about inflation and stabilization, which took place in Latin America between the mid 1950s and early 1960s. Furtado was the first to relate Latin American chronic inflation to the new growth...