This short paper was written as a contribution to an ESHET roundtable about the links between the history of economic thought and economic policies. The history of the field of development economics illustrates, by its very nature as an essentially applied discipline, how ideas and policies...

The present paper reflects about Michael Woodford’s 2003 Interest & Prices, 20 years after its publication. The paper stresses its role (i) in the transition from a ‘neo-monetarist’ towards a ‘neo-Wicksellian’ framework within the New Keynesian - DSGE paradigm; (ii) in the widespread...

Geoffrey Colin Harcourt’s work on the interface between accountancy and economics is a part of his legacy that is less well known than his work on the capital controversies. This paper argues that the analytical findings of this research effort are an important and integral part of...

The paper discusses how early economists, sometimes informed by Alexander Humboldt’s pioneer detailed report on a tropical country (Mexico), interpreted the connections between natural resources, institutions and growth. The apparent paradox of a negative relation between natural wealth and...

The paper investigates the rise and fall of the disequilibrium approach in macroeconomics between the mid 1960s and the late 1970s. During that period macroeconomists became attracted to the interpretation of unemployment phenomena based on the notion that markets are not in equilibrium. It was...

The paper discusses the League of Nations's project to produce consensus in the interpretation of aggregate economic fluctuations in the 1930s. G. Haberler started working in 1934 at the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva on a broad enquiry that should lead to a synthesis of the several...

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...

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...

“For a long period before the writing of the first edition [of Money, Interest and Prices] I had been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between the intuitive feeling, on one hand, that there was a connection between a firm’s product-output and its labor-input, and the traditional demand...