Knowledge that Transforms

An evaluation and commemoration of two pioneering American economists one century after their deaths in 1897. Biographical sketches are followed by expositions and assessments of their contributions to economics. Areas covered include distribution theory, the explanation of poverty, George's single-tax proposal, the business cycle, and money and statistics. A novel interpretation of George's treatment of rent is provided. Also covered are the parallels and antagonisms between George and Walker, and the uneasy relationship between George and the academic economists of the era. An appendix provides a brief guide to the literature.

British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 makes a big leap forward in our understanding of the long-run performance of what became the leading nineteenth-century economy and the workshop of the world. It does so by implementing a giant quantitative enterprise, one that will make it the standard data source for studying the evolution of the British economy for decades to come.

A SPATE OF economic literature appeared in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties as the advanced nations' governments and economists turned their attention to the so-called developing nations. A recent survey of subsequent contributions to the theory and practice of reveals less that is new and important. Meanwhile poverty persists in the less developed countries (LDCs). And economists are realizing that several social sciences are involved. What else has been discovered or relearned during the decade of development now drawing to its close?'

PHE PURPOSE OF this paper is to examine Hicks's contribution to macroeconomic theory in those respects in which it constitutes a response to, or a development of, the work of John Maynard Keynes. Thus, while it is narrower in scope than an attempt to assess Hicks's contribution to macroeconomic theory, it is broader in scope than an attempt to see Hicks as Keynes's interpreter: for an interpreter is judged only by the faithfulness with which he translates the material given to him; he is not required to extend, recast, criticize, or reconstruct that material. We shall be concerned, then, with what Hicks got out of Keynes's writings and what he did with it; not with what was really there. I therefore shall not be concerned with the authenticity or doctrinal purity of Hicks's Keynesianism. In considering Hicks's contribution to I shall be concerned with two distinct but related matters. First, I shall be concerned, in Sections II and III, with Hicks's response to-and in particular his criticisms of-what himself actually wrote. Also, however, I shall, in Section IV, be concerned with Hicks's contribution to those ideas that eventually entered the public domain as economics, quite irrespective of whether those ideas accurately reflect what may or may not have had in mind at some crucial juncture of his career. I should emphasize that these two concerns are intended to consist simply of a narrower and a broader one: they do not involve a contrast between a profound and intellectually challenging of Keynes on the one hand, to be set against a vulgar and degenerate Economics on the other. Accordingly, I shall be using the term Keynesian in a robust sense; I use it in full recognition of the possibility of diverse shades of opinion, and of extreme or borderline cases, on the understanding that it is what all these have in common that is important.

PHE NEW BOOK by William J. Baumol, John C. Panzar and Robert D. Willig is the culmination of several years of research on the related problems of understanding multiproduct cost structures and their implications for competition and market performance. It is a significant book for several reasons. The empirical reality that forms the starting point for the theoretical work is, I think, widely recognized to be important. Cost structures constitute one of the foundations of competitive strategy, and strongly influence industry structure. Notwithstanding this fact, the amount of microeconomic theory directed toward competitively relevant attributes of costs has been, if not minimal, then certainly more limited than the subject deserves. In fact, prior to the work of our authors, economists and business strategists did not have a language or a set of concepts with which to talk precisely about scale economies in a multiproduct setting. We now have at least the beginnings of such a language, and a body of theory that provides a grammar for using it. The theory of contestable markets was the subject of Baumol's presidential address at the American Economic Association meetings in Washington in December 1981. Both the theory and its presentation have generated controversy, useful controversy I think, because it helps clarify issues that need attention. I shall have remarks to offer later in this review concerning the normative and descriptive relevance of the contestable markets hypothesis. My plan for this review is as follows. I begin by outlining some of the principal definitions and propositions of the theory. This outline should not be mistaken for a complete summary of the book. But the economist who has not yet read the book needs a reasonably detailed picture of the approach. Few of the propositions require long proofs: in fact once they are stated, the proofs are often simple exercises. Having outlined some of the principal concepts, I comment upon their usefulness for understanding markets. And finally, I conclude by suggesting some ways in which the general subject may be pursued from this point forward.

THIS ARTICLE'S MAIN PURPOSE iS to discuss certain key problems that arise in calculating purchasing-power parities (PPPs) when making international comparisons of real product, while reviewing partially the work of Irving Kravis, Alan Heston and Robert Summers (1982). Before beginning the discussion, the author wishes to record his opinion that this work of Kravis, Heston and Summers, carried out and successively published over the past 15 years, represents one of the great contributions to applied economics. In the article that precedes this one, Kravis provides a survey of the applications of this type of data, but it must be emphasized that any such listing can do only partial justice to the scope of new applications which seem to arise almost every day. Apart from applications to various aspects of international economic policy, there is so much greater international variation in basic economic variables, such as real income and relative prices, than is usually found in typical intranational/intertemporal comparisons, that the new data inevitably represent an enormous increment in our science's general capacity for statistical experiment. Thus, the debt owed to this team of research workers, by the economics profession at large, is immeasurable. A is essentially a form of international or interregional price index, complicated, but not essentially changed, by the existence of national currencies. For example, suppose we found, by some kind of index-number calculation, that the general price level in region A was 10 percent higher than in region B of the same country. Given a common currency, the between the money circulating in the two regions is clearly 1.0, but the for region A, in comparison with region B, is 0.91, this being the number by which it is necessary to multiply a given nominal income in A to give it the same purchasing power as a corresponding income in B. It follows that the must be some average of the ratios among individual prices in the two regions. In the case of two countries with different currencies, one can speak of a commodity PPP as being the rate of exchange between the two currencies which would equalize the price of a given commodity; then the general for the two countries is some average of the PPPs. In international, as in intertemporal, comparisons, there is a duality between the problem of measuring price levels and

This review essay reviews the volume edited by Owen Humpage, Current Federal Reserve Policy under the Lens of Economic History: Essays to Commemorate the Federal Reserve System’s Centennial, and provides a broader perspective on central-banking issues. The papers in the Humpage volume address various aspects of central banking history, money, and private banking, with a focus on putting recent Fed policies in perspective. The topics covered include the role of the central bank as lender of last resort, the effects of open-market operations versus central-bank lending, central-bank independence, the political economy of monetary unions, financial crises, the effects of unconventional monetary policies, commodity monies, and the Canadian financial system as a natural experiment.

The sixteen essays edited and synthesized by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson contribute significantly to our understanding of the following questions: (1) When did Africa become poor?; (2) Why did Africa become poor?; and (3) Why has Africa remained poor? Although these questions are impossible to answer in a definitive way, the partial explanations offered in this book are insightful and thought provoking and are summarized in this article. However, they also rest primarily on economic and political arguments. The importance of geography, which is mostly not explored in these essays, is reviewed in the final section of this article.

Many migrations are temporary—a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration. Such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants' economic behavior, generating possible consequences for nonmigrants in both home and host countries. In this paper, we provide a thorough examination of the various aspects of temporary migrations that matter for the analysis of economic phenomena. We demonstrate the extent of temporary migrations in population movements. We show how temporariness can affect the various economic choices and how better data have improved both the measurement of nonpermanent migrations and the analyses of various aspects of migrant behavior. We propose a general theoretical framework for modeling temporary migration decisions, based on which we outline the various motives for temporariness while simultaneously reviewing related literature and available data sources. We discuss the possible consequences of migration temporariness for nonmigrants in both home and host countries.