Tag Archives: gunnar myrdal

Michael A. Landesmann On Nicholas Kaldor On The Centrifugal Forces At Work In The Euro Area

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I have noted many times since the Euro Area crisis started how Nicholas Kaldor foresaw it much earlier than anyone else. The year: 1971 ‼

I came across this article Nicholas Kaldor And Kazimierz Łaski On The Pitfalls Of The European Integration Process by Michael A. Landesmann, published in Dec 2019, which is really good. I like the phrase centrifugal forces in the abstract, as the Euro Area is designed to cause countries in it to fly apart.

An interesting snippet:

In sum, Kaldor’s analysis of the pitfalls of the Common Market comprises three components:

  • the almost unavoidable processes leading to ‘structural external imbalances’;
  • the detrimental impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), for a country like the UK …
  • the fact that external imbalances would result in a ‘deflationary bias’ in the deficit countries … This tendency would be strengthened in a fixed exchange-rate regime and, even more so, in a monetary union that would not be complemented by a fiscal union.

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Kaldor’s analysis points to an issue that is of central importance in the set-up of the EC (and continues to be of great relevance in the EU): the likelihood of what he calls the emergence of ‘structural (external) imbalances’. He refers in this respect to G. Myrdal’s ‘circular and cumulative causation’ processes … Which are the cumulative processes that Kaldor alludes to when predicting that integrated groups of countries will experience ‘structural external imbalances’?

Mats Lundahl — Twelve Figures In Swedish Economics

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Mats Lundahl has a new book Twelve Figures In Swedish Economics. The book has a chapter Gunnar Myrdal On Poverty And Circular, Cumulative Causation.

In my opinion, the principle of circular, cumulative causation is the most important principle of economics. The explicit way how it works via international trade is in the works of Nicholas Kaldor. As Anthony Thirlwall points out in his article Kaldor’s 1970 Regional Growth Model Revisited:

Kaldor was more than familiar with Myrdal’s ideas having worked with him in the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) in Geneva from 1947 to 1949, and remained close friends.

In Lundahl’s words (page 105):

Myrdal wanted to explain the pattern that he observed and once more resorted to his idea of circular, cumulative causation. The traditional theory of international trade, in his view, could not explain the disparities. It was conceived in terms of stable equilibrium and pointed to equalization of incomes. Instead, Myrdal suggested, the analysis would have to concentrate on the quality of the factors of production and the effectiveness of their use in different uses. The notion of stable equilibrium was false. The economic system is ‘not steering towards such a position at all but, rather, is continuously en route away from it’ in the cumulative fashion sketched in An American Dilemma. His claims were extraordinarily strong: ‘I have suggested that the principle of interlocking, circular interdependence within a process of cumulative causation has validity over the entire field of social problems.’

A full book version of Mats Lundahl’s article is in his recent book from earlier this year: The Dynamics Of Poverty: Circular, Cumulative Causation, Value Judgments, Institutions And Social Engineering In The World Of Gunnar Myrdal.

Gunnar Myrdal And Circular, Cumulative Causation

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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.

Ramesh Chandra On Nicholas Kaldor And Circular Cumulative Causation

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Ramesh Chandra has a recently released book Endogenous Growth In Historical Perspective: From Adam Smith To Paul Romer, and one of his chapters is on Nicholas Kaldor and circular and cumulative causation.

Chandra’s own views are different but I thought his description of Gunnar Myrdal and Nicholas Kaldor’s insights was amazing with the most appropriate quotes like the following (from page 201 in print/209 in pdf):

Gunnar Myrdal (1956, 1957) and Nicholas Kaldor (1978), on the other hand, argued that because of the operation of circular cumulative causation free trade led to interregional and international inequalities. Myrdal (1956) maintained that “if left to its own course, economic development is a process of circular and cumulative causation which tends to award its favours to those who are already well endowed and even to thwart the effort of those who happen to live in regions that are lagging behind” (quoted from Meier 1989, p. 385). Further, “on the international as well as national level trade does not by itself necessarily work for equality. A widening of markets strengthens often on the first hand the progressive countries whose manufacturing industries have the lead and are already fortified in surroundings of external economies, while the underdeveloped countries are in continuous danger of seeing even what they have of industry and, in particular, their small scale industry and handicrafts outcompeted by cheap imports from industrial countries, if they do not protect them” (ibid., p. 385). International trade does promote primary exports from developing countries but here they face adverse demand conditions or inelastic demand in world markets. Any technological improvements which reduce primary goods prices benefit the importing countries. Thus, “forces in the markets will in a cumulative way tend to cause even greater international inequalities between countries as to their level of economic development and average national income per capita” (ibid., p. 385).

Likewise, Kaldor (1978), in his paper “Nemesis of free trade”, thought that free trade may be good under constant costs but under increasing returns it benefitted some countries (or regions) at the cost impoverishment of others. He agreed with Myrdal that international trade perpetuated international inequalities, and developing countries would do well if they industrialized behind tariff and quantitative restrictions. Kaldor also stated that protectionism was good not only for developing countries but also for a developed country like Britain. In the initial stages of her growth, free trade suited Britain. But after Germany, France, USA, and Japan industrialized, Britain could not compete and one market after another became closed. Had Britain not been ideologically wedded to free trade, her living standards would have been much better.

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References

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Kaldor, Nicholas. 1978. Nemesis of free trade. In Further Essays on Applied Economics. London: Duckworth.

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Meier, Gerald M. 1989. Leading Issues in Economic Development. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Myrdal, Gunnar. 1956. Development and Underdevelopment. Cairo: National Bank of Egypt Fiftieth Commemoration Lectures.

Myrdal, Gunnar. 1957. Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions. London: Gerald Duckworth

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Noah Smith On Free Trade

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In an article The Man Who Made Us See That Trade Isn’t Always Free for Bloomberg View, Noah Smith says this about David Autor:

So, I asked, how should trade policy be changed? Autor’s answers again surprised me. He suggested that the process of admitting China to the World Trade Organization back in 2000 should have been slowed down significantly. That would have given American workers and industries time to prepare for, and adjust to, China’s competitive onslaught.

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He told me that the U.S. government should focus attention on manufacturing industries, and even use industrial policy to bolster the sector.

Traditionally, economists have looked down their noses at “manufacturing fetishism,” but Autor says he thinks the sector is underrated.

Of course, heterodox economists have known this for long. As Nicholas Kaldor said in his 1980 article, Foundations And Implications Of Free Trade Theory, written in Unemployment In Western Countries (probably my most favourite quote in this blog):

Owing to increasing returns in processing activities (in manufactures) success breeds further success and failure begets more failure. Another Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal called this’the principle of circular and cumulative causation’.

It is as a result of this that free trade in the field of manfactured goods led to the concentration of manufacturing production in certain areas – to a ‘polarization process’ which inhibits the growth of such activities in some areas and concentrates them on others.

Of course Smith saying all this isn’t exactly heresy as economists are known to make mea culpa all the time and then backtrack. Nonetheless, this article is still revealing. Smith also talks of the importance of empirical work. In heterodox literature, there is of course the work of Anthony Thirlwall, John McCombie and others. See Models Of Balance of Payments Constrained Growth: History, Theory And Empirical Evidence, Soukiazis, E., Cerqueira, P. (Eds.).

There’s also evidence from Ricardo Hausmann and César A. Hidalgo of Harvard University. See this Nature article.

John McCombie in the above quoted book, Models of Balance Of Payments Constrained Growth, in his chapter, Criticisms and Defences Of The Balance Of Payments Constrained Growth Model: Some Old, Some New, recognizes the work of Hausmann, Hidalogo, et al. :

Hausmann et al., (2007) have also stressed the importance of the sophistication of a country’s exports for its rate of output growth. They measure the sophistication of a particular export in terms of an index of the weighted per capita income of the countries that export that good, where the weights correspond to the revealed comparative advantage of the countries producing that good (PRODY). Then the average productivity of a country’s export basket is measured using this productivity index together with the relative shares of exports of the country concerned (EXPY). They found that EXPY was a statistically significant explanatory variable of per capita GDP growth in a regression which also included control variables.

These theoretical and empirical works go so much against the economist case for free trade, the most sacred tenet in economics.

Dani Rodrik On Free Trade

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In a recent article for Foreign Policy, Dani Rodrik makes this claim:

Meanwhile, economists rightly point out that trade is only weakly implicated in the major economic problems of the day — deindustrialization and income inequality. They are correct that the distributional consequences of trade are better addressed with safety net programs and nontrade remedies. But they have systematically downplayed these consequences — especially when the requisite compensatory programs have remained on paper. And they seem unable to grasp the valid core of the public’s concern about social dumping.

It’s a bit disappointing that Dani Rodrik who presents himself as a dissenter is towing the line of the New Consensus. The new trade theory, which is a part of the new consensus says that free trade is fine as long as losers are compensated. In this article Rodrik states the same but just takes issue on the latter part, i.e., compensation.

This line of argument is deeply flawed. An individual country’s growth has a deflationary bias because free trade puts a rein on fiscal policy to achieve full employment. So who is there to compensate? Moreover, it’s not comparative advantage which governs economic dynamics but absolute advantage via Gunnar Myrdal’s principle of circular and cumulative advantage . As Nicholas Kaldor says, “success breeds further success and failure begets more failure.”

Moreover it’s the the whole world economy which has a deflationary bias because of free trade as pointed out by Nicholas Kaldor in his 1980 article Foundations And Implications Of Free Trade Theory

In a recent article on the ‘Causes of Growth and Recession in World Trade’,1 T. F. Cripps has demonstrated that a country is not ‘balance of payments constrained’ if its full employment imports, M*, are less that its import capacity M̅ (as determined by its earning from exports). Such a country is free to choose the level of domestic demand which it considers optimal for its own circumstances,2 whereas the other countries from whom M* > M̅, must, under conditions of free trade, reduce their output and employment below the full employment level, and import only what they can afford to finance. He then shows that the sum of imports of the ‘unconstrained’ countries determine the attainable level of production and employment of the ‘constrained’ countries, and the remedy for this situation requires measures that increase the level of ‘full-employment’ imports or else reduce the export share of the ‘unconstrained countries’. The ‘rules of the game’ which would be capable of securing growth and stability in international trade, and of restoring the production of the ‘constrained’ countries to full employment levels, may require discriminatory measure of import control, of the type envisaged in the famous ‘scarce currency clause’ of the Bretton Woods agreement.

In the absence of such measures all countries may suffer a slower rate of growth and a lower level of output and employment, and not only the group of countries whose economic activity is ‘balance-of-payments constrained’. This is because the ‘surplus’ countries’ own exports will be lower with the shrinkage of world trade, and they may not offset this (or not adequately) by domestic reflationary measures so that their imports will also be lower. Provided that the import regulations introduced relate to import propensities (i.e. to the relation of imports to domestic output) and not to the absolute level of imports as such, the very fact that such measures will raise the trade, production and employment of the ‘constrained’ countries will mean that the volume of exports and domestic income of the ‘unconstrained’ countries will also be greater, despite the downward change in their share of world exports.3

Footnotes:

1Cambridge Economic Policy Review (March 1978), pp, 37-43.

2Owing to the widespread view according to which a given increase in effective demand is more ‘inflationary’ in its consequences if brought about by budgetary measure than if it is the result of additional investment or exports (irrespective of any limitations of import capacity) the inequality or potential inequality in its payments balance may cause a surplus country to regard a lower level of domestic demand as ‘optimal’ in the first case than in the second case.

3In other words, if countries whose ‘full employment’ balance of payments shows a surplus because M* < α W (where M* is the level of full employment imports, α is the share of a particular country’s exports of in world trade W) after a reduction of α to α̂ (α̂ < α) through the imposition of discriminatory measures, the country will still be better off if α̂ W* > α W where W* is the volume of world trade generated under full employment conditions.

Of course, the solution is hard and in my opinion, international agreements to reach balanced trade is the correct way. Free trade is the most sacred tenet in all of macroeconomics and it’s not going to be easy to get rid of it.