Mihail Manoilescu’s international trade theories in retrospect: how and when emerging economies must be protected?

Mihail Manoilescu was one of the main intellectual personalities of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and a central banker, but also as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s till the end of his life, Manoilescu’s ideas and theories were marked by a clear continuity and consistency based on the theory of protectionism. His defence of protectionism is generally presented as clumsy and founded on incorrect method. This paper contributes to a testament of Manoilescu’s conclusions, the validity of which we test in two different paradigms. Section 2 presents the theory of protectionism formulated by the author. Section 3 tries to interpret Manoilescu’s views in modern terms. It presents arguments assimilating his analysis to some post-Marxist presentations of the after-war period. It also develops a Ricardian model proving that Manoilescu’s intuitions can be verified in a Ricardian context. The last section concludes.