FROM AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS TO THE SWEDISH WELFARE STATE: WICKSELLIAN VIEWS ON MONEY AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION

The redistribution of incomes is a recurrent theme in the works of Wicksell, Hayek and the Stockholm School, which focused on interest-rate misalignments and subsequent imbalances of investment and saving. Distributional issues were also at the centre of the policy concepts that later came to be known as “the Swedish model”. Yet, with few exceptions, Wicksellian analysis of the transmission of monetary impulses to income distribution and its feedbacks is surprisingly meagre. This paper analyses the links and gaps between distributive and monetary discourses in the Wicksellian literature. It shows that the nature of the gaps changed from failures to overcome the neoclassical dichotomy of general equilibrium and monetary theory to historical disjunctions in pre- and post-war policy regimes.