This paper documents Richard Kahn’s role as an unofficial advisor to the Israeli Government, using archival and published sources. In 1957, Kahn predicted that the European Economic Community (EEC) customs union would harm Israel’s trade and that the EEC would reject Israel’s application...

Recent historiography on the interest of Italian economists in American economic thought is becoming rich and valuable. Thanks to these sources, we know that this interest arose because several Italian economists were attracted by the realism featured in North American economic investigation, by...

Commodity markets are characterized by high price volatility, inefficient resource allocation and the cyclical reappearance of excessive surpluses and shortages. Historically, these problems and their relevant socio-economic implications have been tackled by means of protectionist measures at...

In 1975 in Italy, as a result of an agreement between the Trade Unions and the Italian Manufacturers’ Association, the escalator clause mechanism was changed, establishing a 100% indexation of wages to the rate of inflation. This crucial event led to the so-called “Modigliani controversy”....

<em>Un sistema imperfetto: il Gold Standard e i suoi critici (1870-1914)</em> - This paper examines the debate on the gold standard from 1870 to 1914. In this period the gold standard becomes the world’s monetary regime, but this political success is disputed by a considerable part of the coeval...

Between 1969 and the early nineteen-eighties a unique parabola took place in Italy that was both historical and theoretical. We are referring here to the birth, development and decline of a research project that had assumed Sraffa’s book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities as its...

In the history of monetary theory and monetary policy, there can be little doubt that the 1980’s are seen as a watershed. Following a disastrous decade of inflation and recession in the 1970’s, the monetarist ideas of Milton Friedman are largely seen to have triumphed then over the older...

In this text an analysis is presented concerning who were first to form and accept new macroeconomic policy ideas in Sweden: economic politicians or professional economists. Those ideas were later to be accepted in international mainstream economics. Four paradigmatic shifts, all of them...

We analyse the impact of economists on post-war economic policy in Belgium. The severe budgetary and monetary crisis of the mid-1920s which brought the country on the brink of hyperinflation and a state moratorium, framed economic policy for several decades to come. Until the mid-1950s inflation...

Although international economic coordination was one of the major questions arising in international economics after World War I, when the British hegemonic stability broke down, it mainly attracted the interest of economists from the 1960s onwards, as economic interdependence revealed itself to...