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...

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,...

The role of traveling as a source of discovery and development of new ideas has been controversial in the history of economics. Despite their protective attitude toward established theory, economists have traveled widely and gained new insights or asked new questions as a result of their...

The paper provides a narrative of the effort to develop a structuralist macroeconomic model in Latin America, as seen through the eyes of Chilean economist Osvaldo Sunkel (b. 1929). Sunkel faced the problem of how to model structuralism, an indigenous Latin American contribution to economics and...

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 June 1961 the American economist Douglass North visited Brazil for 3 weeks, for a mission organized by the US State Department and Instituto Brasileiro de Economia (IBRE-FGV). The goals of North's Brazilian mission were to evaluate Sudene's plans for the Northeast - which involved meeting...

From its flow tide, fueled by the Cold War, to its ebbing with the anti-growth movement and the economic crises of the early 1970s, the "growthmen" of MIT stood at the center of the dominant field in macroeconomics. The history of MIT growth economics is traced from Solow's seminal neoclassical...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has attracted significant attention from epidemiologists and economists alike. This differs from the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza pandemic, when academic economists hardly paid attention to its economic features, despite its very high mortality toll. We examine the...