The present paper is set out to examine the place of Geoff Harcourt's 1965 "Two-sector model of the distribution of income and the level of employment in the short run" in his research agenda, as well as its original historical context and fate. That pioneer model articulated how the production...

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,...

The theory of economic development was an exception to Paul Samuelson's claim of being a "generalist" in economics. It was a hard subject to tackle analytically because of the intrinsic difficulty of some of the concepts involved, such as increasing returns and long-term economic evolution....

Samuelson kept optimization-based problems separated from macroeconomic dynamics in his Foundations, where dynamics were defined in terms of difference and differential equations. Despite some criticism of his "correspondence principle" of stability analysis by D.F. Gordon, D. Patinkin and...

Paul Samuelson's famous 1948 "factor price equalization theorem" was his main contribution to international trade theory. He demonstrated conditions under which trade in goods only would lead to full equalization of the remuneration of productive factors across countries. In practice, general...

The paper investigates the political and economic contexts of the controversy about the causes of the significant increase of income concentration in Brazil during the 1960s. That was the most important economic debate that took place under the military dictatorship that ran the country from...

Lewis argued that his 1954 model of economic development in a dual economy was based on the classical framework originally advanced by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. The present paper provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis adopted and adapted classical concepts such as...

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...