Marcel Labordère: A Neglected French Contribution To Trade Cycle Theory

Marcel Labordère was a little known French economist who died, aged 77, in 1946. He was regarded as an eccentric, a self‐educated economist, whose major contact with the economics profession seems to have been through J. M. Keynes and D. H. Robertson. In 1908 he put forward an over‐investment theory of the trade cycle; in this the crisis results from a shortage of real saving. The amount of saving in the economy which is available for investment is determined by the accumulated stock of consumer goods. If production is to shift to capital goods, away from consumer goods, the economy must have a stock of consumer goods (real saving) to utilise whilst this shift in production is taking place. The crisis arises where the stock of consumer goods is insufficient to support the amount of investment undertaken in the boom; that is, it is caused by a disproportionate amount of capital goods being produced relative to consumer goods. Although worked out in isolation from A. Spiethoff's theory of crisis, it is somewhat similar to it, but it contrasts with the over‐investment theories associated with M. Tugan‐Baranowski and A. Aftalion. Labordère's work had a major influence upon D. H. Robertson in his writing of ‘A Study of Industrial Fluctuation’ (1915), one of the foremost British contributions to trade cycle theory.