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Full-Text Articles in Economic Theory
The (Im-)Possibility Of Rational Socialism: Mises In China’S Market Reform Debate, Isabella M. Weber
The (Im-)Possibility Of Rational Socialism: Mises In China’S Market Reform Debate, Isabella M. Weber
Economics Department Working Paper Series
This paper investigates the long first decade of reform in China (1978-1992) to show that Mises, in particular his initiating contribution to the Socialist Calculation Debate, became relevant to the reconfiguration of China’s political economy when the reformers gave up on the late Maoist primacy of continuous revolution and adhered instead to an imperative of development and catching up. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao had rejected the notions of efficiency and rational economic management. In the late 1970s, the reformers under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership elevated these notions to highest principle. As a result, Mises’ critique that socialism could not achieve …
The Nature Of Money And The Theory Of International Trade: Thornton And Ricardo, Isabella M. Weber
The Nature Of Money And The Theory Of International Trade: Thornton And Ricardo, Isabella M. Weber
Economics Department Working Paper Series
A rich recent literature reinvestigates the nature of money, but little attention has been paid to the ramifications of the ways in which we theorize money for the theory of international trade. This paper examines the logical relationship between the neutrality of money and self-balancing trade based on Henry Thornton and David Ricardo as two foundational contributions to credit and commodity money theories respectively. I show that both authors theorize trade as self-balancing whenever money is conceptualized as neutral. I distinguish two notions of the neutrality of money: ex ante and ex post neutrality. In Thornton’s Paper Credit money is …