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Hardcover, x + 317 pages, NOT ex-library. Limited signs of wear, pages are clean and bright with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Boards show faint handling marks, short creases; an ISBN sticker on the back. Issued without a dust jacket. -- Contents: Introduction; I. Primary Sources of the Modern Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson Factor-Propositions Theory of International Trade -- Effect of Foreign Trade on the Distribution of Income / Eli Heckscher; Theory of Interregional Exchange / Bertil Ohlin; Welfare Economics and International Trade / Paul Samuelson; Gains from International Trade / Paul Samuelson; Protection and Real Wages / Wolfgang Stolper & Paul Samuelson; II. Developments in Modern Trade Theory in the 1930s -- Use of Indifference Curves in the Analysis of International Trade / Wassily Leontief; Diagrammatical Representation of Cost Conditions in International Trade / Abba P. Lerner; Diagrammatical Representation of Demand Conditions in International Trade / Abba P. Lerner; Symmetry Between Import and Export Taxes / Abba P. Lerner; Factor Prices and International Trade / Abba P. Lerner -- "Comparative advantage, pioneered by David Ricardo and Robert Torrens, remains the fundamental tool for understanding the gains from trade and the pattern of the international division of labour. But what explains the differences in comparative costs of production among countries with access to the same technologies? The heart of the modern real theory of international trade looks to the relative abundance of the factors of production in different countries. Generations of students have learnt the textbook Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson 2 x 2 x 2 model (2 goods, 2 countries, labour and capital as the 2 factors of production). Eli Philip Heckscher 1879-1952 was primarily an economic historian and statistician, holding a chair at the Stockholm School of Economics. In addition to his economic history of Sweden from the 16th century to 1815 and his work on Swedish population movements, Heckscher's definitive studies of Napoleon's Continental System and of mercantilism focused on international trade. As Heckscher explains in his 1919 article reprinted in this book, his uncharacteristic (but very fruitful) excursion into more formal economic theorizing was provoked by a review of one of Heckscher's books by the great Swedish monetary theorist Knut Wicksell. Heckscher's analysis of the effect of foreign trade on a nation's income distribution was developed much further by his student Bertil Ohlin 1879-1979, who combined professorships in Copenhagen and at the Stockholm School of Economics with a political career. Ohlin's combination of Heckscher's insight with the simplified version of Walrasian general equilibrium analysis expounded by Gustav Cassell (Ohlin's doctoral supervisor) is represented here by Ohlin's thesis and his 1924 doctoral dissertation. When Ohlin submitted an article based on his dissertation to the Economic Journal in the early 1920s, he received, enclosed with the rejection letter, a note stating: "This amounts to nothing and should be refused. JM Keynes". The economics discipline has not agreed with Keynes about this, and in 1977 Ohlin shared the Royal Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel. This prize, created in 1969, was won in 1970 by Paul Samuelson of MIT, a leader in so many fields of economic theory. Just as Ohlin is represented by his earliest formulations of his trade theory, the three Samuelson articles reprinted here are from his wunderkind years as a Harvard graduate student, and emphasize the welfare implications of a trade pattern reflecting relative factor endowments. Stolper and Samuelson showed that a tariff will unambiguously increase the real wage in a Heckscher-Ohlin model with labour as the scarce factor of production, and Samuelson went further then Ohlin in arguing that trade in goods leads to complete equalization of factor prices across countries.
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