Đang chuẩn bị nút TẢI XUỐNG, xin hãy chờ
Tải xuống
History of Economic Analysis part 75. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 702 Commodity-Trade Theory of international finance or of international payments or of international gold movements . The commodity-trade theory of international finance is thus open to the criticism as is the theory of international values that its conception of the phenomena with which it undertakes to deal is much too narrow.2 Also it must be pointed out that its particular assumptions disqualify it for direct practical application. But there is another criticism that strikes at it within its own precincts and should be mentioned at once because it has received undue prominence during the last twenty years or so. A theory of international finance that pivots on commodity trade will naturally emphasize the equilibrating role of variations in relative prices. It has been pointed out first by Wicksell that adjustments to disturbances of trade relations may and often do take place without actual changes in prices and also without actual gold movements. This is true of course and no classic writer least of all Ricardo would have denied it. But if the classic theory be nevertheless criticized on the ground that it put an altogether unjustifiable burden upon the price mechanism and in doing so failed to notice other equilibrating factors then the critic is wrong because price variations of the kind the classic theory visualizes imply shifts of demand curves which in turn imply variations in income as we shall see presently. Moreover in the pattern which the classics chose for analysis price variations in fact do hold the key position. All the critic can rightfully say is that this is no longer so in patterns in which prices are rigid and capital movements dominant. Finally several writers of the period under survey explicitly introduced the factors that critics miss in the classical picture.3 In the third place the classic theory of international finance was not fundamentally new. Thornton who blocked it out referred approvingly and .
