IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-03196-2_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Comment

In: The International Allocation of Economic Activity

Author

Listed:
  • Harold Brookfield

Abstract

For a human geographer, straight out of 18 months in the field in the South Pacific, to be asked to comment on papers by Gottfried Haberler and Bertil Ohlin is a somewhat awesome experience. I comment mainly on Haberler’s contribution in what follows, since Ohlin’s remarks are themselves to some degree a commentary on the symposium as a whole. I expected to comment on a paper concerning the historical evolution of the international allocation of economic activity since about 1800, but I find that Haberler has instead provided us with an elegant survey of theory, classical and modern, which is — as Ohlin remarks — masterly in its simplicity. However, it concerns a world largely innocent of tariffs, bilateral trade agreements, multinational corporations, O.P.E.C., U.N.C.T.A.D., C.O.M.E.C.O.N., the E.E.C., and so on. Ohlin does introduce these complications, and very effectively, but he leaves open to some degree the central argument posed by Haberler who concludes, at page 12, that: ‘Competitive general equilibrium theory is useful or even indispensable as an ideal type which enables us better to visualise, evaluate and measure aberrations from the ideal conditions which abound in the real world’.

Suggested Citation

  • Harold Brookfield, 1977. "Comment," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Bertil Ohlin & Per-Ove Hesselborn & Per Magnus Wijkman (ed.), The International Allocation of Economic Activity, pages 70-79, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-03196-2_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-03196-2_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-03196-2_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.