Marcel Boumans, "Survey of Recent Work in the History of Econometrics: A Witness Report"
This survey is a witness report of what is happening in the community of historians of econometrics. This survey is a follow-up of an earlier survey which investigated who was active in the history of econometrics. The conclusion of the earlier survey was that interest in the history of econometrics has arisen primarily from within econometrics itself and that its stories have been written mainly by econometricians. The conclusion of the current survey is that econometrics as a discipline remains of interest only to the econometricians but that the artifacts created by econometricians have caught the attention of historians of science.
Herrade Igersheim, "The Death of Welfare Economics: History of a Controversy"
The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, as set out in his pathbreaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function—one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis—does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function, though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow’s attacks. The aim of this article is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and involved a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and, behind them, two distinct communities—welfare economics, which was on the wane, against the emerging social choice theory—representing two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and two different conceptions of social welfare.
Antonella Rancan, "Income Distribution, Consumption, and Economic Growth in Italy: Kaldor's Theory versus the Life Cycle Hypothesis, 1960s and 1970s"
The paper discusses Modigliani, Brumberg, and Ando’s life cycle hypothesis and its difficult acceptance in Italy over the 1960s and 1970s. The increasing attention to the effects of income redistribution on consumption coupled with the strong influence that post-Keynesian economics exercised on the theoretical and political debate of that time led to a widespread preference of Kaldor’s theory as over the life cycle as the best representation of Italian savings behavior.
Guy Numa, "Jean-Baptiste Say on Free Trade"
Jean-Baptiste Say is generally portrayed as an unrelenting champion of laissez faire who believed commercial activity promoted economic well-being. However, I develop a more nuanced portrait of Say’s thinking by showing that he did not believe that free trade was an unmitigated good. He thus identified several exceptions to free international trade that justified government intervention in the form of restrictions on imports and public subsidies to domestic industries. Going beyond Adam Smith’s arguments for protective tariffs, Say maintained that government could play a role to protect infant industries, insisting on the fact that protectionism could only be gradually and carefully removed. Drawing upon Say’s published writings and archival sources, I show that Say developed original views on domestic and international trade, several of which were distinct from those of Smith. Overall, Say’s analysis of free trade sheds greater light on his conception of the role of government in a market economy. It illustrates under what conditions the government should intervene in order to achieve both economic efficiency and social justice.
Giuseppe Freni, Neri Salvadori, and Rodolfo Signorino, "Back to Agriculture? Malthus, Torrens, and Ricardo on International Trade and Structural Change"
Malthus’s main economic argument against free corn trade in his Essay on Population concerned the issue of structural change triggered by international trade. Malthus claimed that, in the long run, agricultural countries will develop their domestic industrial sectors and cut both their corn exports and their imports of foreign industrial goods. We critically assess Malthus’s views and compare them with Torrens 1815 and Ricardo 1822. We argue that the weak point of Malthus’s reasoning lies in his inability to perceive that an international trade-induced structural change process is at work both in agricultural and manufacturing countries. Moreover, we show that, notwithstanding the broad similarity of their conclusions, Torrens and Ricardo followed two analytically different paths.
Review Essay: Ivo Maes, "Central Banking through the Centuries"
Reviews five recent books on central banking.
Reviews of Liberalism and the Welfare State: Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State, edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W. Bateman, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Dieter Plehwe; F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy, and Social Philosophy, by Peter J. Boettke; Measuring Utility: From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics, by Ivan Moscati.