Alfred Weber 1868-1958 Alfred Weber was a German economist. He gained his Ph.D from the University of Berlin, taught economics there and at Prague and Heidelberg. Weher’s most important economic work was Theory of the Location of Industries (1909). In this book, Weher emphasised the role of production costs, especially those of transportation, in determining […]

David Ricardo 1772 – 1823 David Ricardo was a British economist. At fourteen he entered his father’s business, but in 1793 he set up on his own and made a fortune on the Stock Exchange. Ricardo’s most important work was Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). This book deals with all the controversial questions […]

Walt Whitman Rostow 1916-2003 Walt Whitman Rostow is an American economist and historian, educated at Yale and Oxford. He taught at Cambridge and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming special assistant to President Johnson in 1966. His most important writings include The Process of Economic Growth (1962), and Stages of Economic Growth (1960). […]

Paul Anthony Samuelson 1915-2009 Paul Anthony Samuelson is an American economist, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1970. He is best known for his textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1955. Samuelson has been a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1947. The distinguishing feature of his work […]

Jean Baptiste Say 1767-1832 Jean Baptiste Say was a French economist who originally intended to pursue a business career. However, reading Smith’s Wealth of Nations inspired him to take up political economy. He taught at the Conservatoire des Arts et Meitiers, and the College de France. His most important works are Traite’ d’economique politique (1803) […]

Joseph Mois Schumpeter 1883-1950 Joseph Mois Schumpeter was an Austrian economist, educated in Vienna. He taught at Czernowitz, Graz and Bonn. In 1932, he moved to Harvard where he taught until his death. Among Schumpeter’s writings are Theory of Economic Development (1912), Business Cycles (1939), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), and History of Economic Analysis […]

Tibor Scitovsky 1910-2002 Tibor Scitovsky was born in Hungary, he was educated at the Universities of Budapest, Cambridge, Paris, and at the LSE. He taught at Stanford, California, Berkeley and Yale. Scitovsky contributed to the theory of prices and welfare economics. His most famous book Welfare and Competition synthesizes these two aspects of economic analysis. […]

Adam Smith 1723-1790 Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher Educated in Glasgow and at Balliol, Oxford, Smith later became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University and frequently lectured at Edinburgh. The text of some of these lectures provided the base for his hook The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. This […]

Nassau William Senior 1790-1864 Nassau William Senior was a British economist, educated at Oxford where he twice held the post of Drummond Professor of Political Economy. Senior’s most important book was Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836). He is best remembered for his abstinence theory of interest in which interest is a payment, […]

Piero Staffa 1898-1983 Piero Staffa was an Italian economist, educated at the University of Turin. He later became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Emeritus Reader in Economics. His article The Low of Returns under Competitive Conditions printed in the Economic Journal in 1926, provided the groundwork for later theories of imperfect competition. Staffa’s other […]