Interregional and International Trade.

OHLIN, Bertil:

Published by Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933., 1933

About this Item

First Edition. xvii, 617 pp. Original cloth. Spine slightly rubbed, else Very Good, without dust jacket. Harvard Economic Studies XXXIX. Bertil Ohlin: Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1977 (shared with James E. Meade), 'for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements.' 'The re-writing of my thesis in English and the adding of a section on location theory could not be done as quickly as I had hoped. In 1928 I sent a version to Harvard in the competition for the David Wells prize. Taussig sent me a kind letter and said that they had granted the prize to another economist but that they were willing to print my long manuscript in the Harvard Economic Studies. I was delighted. The book was finished in January 1931, when I had returned to Sweden as successor to Heckscher in the Stockholm School of Business. Several colleagues, and, particularly, Carl Iversen, made useful, more or less critical observations about the manuscript. Chiefly owing to my own correcting and revising proofs - after valuable suggestion by my colleague and relative, Tord Palander - the book did not appear until the spring of 1933. Apart from the general approach indicated above, the book was characterised by an attempt to pay more attention to how factor supply reactions, location, taxation, social policy, and risk affect international division of labour. The static factor proportion model was only a beginning' (Ohlin in his 'Autobiography' on the Nobel Foundation Web site. '. . . Ohlin's reputation was only firmly secured by the publication of Interregional and International Trade, a book which won him the Nobel Prize. Starting from an article written in 1919 by his old teacher, Eli Heckscher, Ohlin developed the thesis that both interregional and international trade are devices for the spatial exchange of the goods and services produced by factors of production since these factors themselves are to a greater or lesser extent incapable of being moved in space -- think of land as the classic case of an immovable factor -- in consequence of which relative prices in different geographical locations depend on the relative scarcity of factor endowments in these locations. This 'Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem', as it was soon to be called, entered almost immediately into the textbook literature, although not without a push from Samuelson in the 1940s, and the stimulus of Leontief's apparent empirical refutation of the theorem in the 1950s. It is doubtful, however, whether any later textbook treatment improved on Ohlin's own masterful presentation . . . By the end of the book, the entire range of international economic problems has been discussed and, moreover, the intimate connections between location theory, regional economics, and international trade have been brilliantly displayed' (Mark Blaug, Great Economists Since Keynes, pp. 185-6). Seller Inventory # 13596

Bibliographic Details

Title: Interregional and International Trade.

Publisher: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933.

Publication Date: 1933

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

Edition: 1st Edition