The Political Myopia of Economic Activism

Should long-term money targets be abandoned in favour of a more interventionist approach to the management of the economy? Professor Geoffrey Wood, of the City University Business School in London, distinguishes the long-term importance of monetarist theory from the short-sighted unreliability of political intervention.     

Give Heckscher and Ohlin a chance!

Give Heckscher and Ohlin a Chance! — This paper argues that criticism of the empirical inaccuracy of Heckscher-Ohlin theory has been much exaggerated. Most tests have mis-specified the theory, particularly in their treatment of capital, a factor of production which is internationally mobile and therefore generally does not influence the pattern of trade. The argument is illustrated by a review of empirical studies of North-South trade in manufactures, which is well explained by a skill-only Heckscher-Ohlin model.     

Money substitutes and monetary policy in the U.K., 1922–1974

In the U.K., following the publication of the Radcliffe Report, it was widely believed that monetary policy was impotent because any attempt to make use of monetary policy would be fully offset by perfect money substitutes which were not controlled by the monetary authorities. This paper tests whether such substitutes exist. The technique is to fit a money demand function to a long run of data allowing the interest elasticity to vary from observation to observation, and using a procedure which permits infinite values of the elasticity. It was found that, although the elasticity does vary, no observation was consistent with the Radcliffe view. This was true for both interest rates tried, and the function proved very stable when tested. We conclude that the Radcliffe Hypothesis can be decisively rejected.