The practical triumph of the free trade doctrine is the fact that even the severest critics of the general policy line of noninterference usually find it difficult to free themselves from its fascination.

– Gunnar Myrdal

I was reading this book The Dynamics Of Poverty: Circular, Cumulative Causation, Value Judgments, Institutions And Social Engineering In The World Of Gunnar Myrdal by Mats Lundahl, which is a sort of an intellectual biography published in 2021.

Gunnar Myrdal was the first to apply his own idea of circular, cumulative causation to international trade and success and failure of nations. Roughly it means: success breeds further success and failure begets more failure, in the words of Nicholas Kaldor.

Although the idea was original to Myrdal, the detailed mechanism was first formulated by Nicholas Kaldor in 1970 in his paper The Case For Regional Policies.

According to Lundahl’s book Myrdal’s genius can be found in the following works (page 82):

Gunnar Myrdal also spent much of the 1950s working on problems related to poverty and inequality on the international level and on the relation between polarization between regions within a country and polarization between countries. This resulted in a ‘trilogy’: An International Economy, Development and Under-Development: A Note on the Mechanism of National and International Economic Inequality, usually referred to as his Cairo lectures, and Economic Theory and Under-Developed Regions (or Rich Lands and Poor).¹⁸

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¹⁸Myrdal (1956a, 1956b, 1957a, 1957b).

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References

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• Myrdal, Gunnar (1956a), An International Economy: Problems and Prospects. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers
• Myrdal, Gunnar (1956b), Development and Under-Development: A Note on the Mechanism of National and International Economic Inequality. Cairo: National Bank of Egypt
• Myrdal, Gunnar (1957a), Economic Theory and Under-Developed Regions. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co
• Myrdal, Gunnar (1957b), Rich Lands and Poor: The Road to World Prosperity. New York: Harper & Brothers

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You can find the first and the third/fourth book (which are the same but just different names in the UK and the US) at Internet Archive in this link. “Cairo Lectures”, seems difficult to obtain, but the important part Trade As A Mechanism Of International Equality can be found in Gerald M. Meier’s book Leading Issues In Economic Development.