3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A generation of development economists held that primary-product exporters face an inexorable secular decline in their terms of trade, and thus a standing case for protection and industrialization. Haberler subjects that thesis to sustained scrutiny and finds it wanting: the historical evidence is thin, neglects quality improvements, new manufactured goods, and freight costs, and confuses a fall in commodity prices with a fall in welfare. Distinguishing commodity from single factorial terms of trade, he shows that cheaper exports need not mean loss where export productivity has risen, and he treats the cyclical instability of raw-material prices as real but exaggerated by the freak experience of the 1930s. His remedy is not buffer stocks and commodity agreements but financial discipline—reserves accumulated in booms and drawn down in slumps.
It is well known that the hypothesis under consideration is based entirely on the annual index of the United Kingdom's commodity terms of trade.
Ragnar Nurkse's path ran from Estonia through Edinburgh and Vienna to the League of Nations, Columbia, and an early death in 1959, and Haberler's introduction to his collected writings reads that path as a single sustained inquiry into international economic order. The apparently scattered concerns — capital movements, monetary equilibrium, balance-of-payments adjustment, balanced growth — cohere, he argues, because Nurkse joined rigorous theory to careful statistics without letting either dominate. Haberler traces the Viennese early work, shaped by Hayek and Mises, on capital flows arising when stages in the structure of production sit in different countries, through the League studies that produced the classic International Currency Experience, to the development essays. Crucially, he insists Nurkse drew no protectionist or central-planning moral from balanced growth.
There is no sense in committing suicide in order to avoid death.
Ricardo's wine-and-cloth doctrine, stripped of its labour theory of value and restated in general-equilibrium and welfare terms, still governs agriculture and primary exports, so Haberler argues against a mid-century development economics eager to bury it. He grants that perfect competition and the absence of externalities never fully hold, but denies that the sheer pervasiveness of such impurities refutes the theory. Point by point he dismantles the objections: the ECLA-Kaldor claim that farm exporters face monopolistic industrial sellers, the Prebisch-Singer thesis of secularly deteriorating terms of trade, which he shows unsupported by Lipsey's data, and the notion of agricultural labour with zero marginal product. His one real concession is the genuine external economy of training a skilled, supervisory, and entrepreneurial workforce, the only sound version of the infant-industry case.
But no theory, however complicated and refined, can offer more than a simplified or idealized picture of the infinite complexities of the real world.
Regional integration schemes like the European Common Market are new, this presidential address contends, only in a narrow institutional sense; the deeper story spans two centuries of world economic history. Haberler discerns three great waves of integration that dwarf the postwar regional projects: the internal unification of national markets (the German Zollverein, the U.S. Constitution, Italian unification), the nineteenth-century movement toward freer world trade under British leadership and the gold standard, and the post-1945 restoration of multilateral exchange after the disintegration of 1914 to 1945. That interwar collapse he blames on monetary destruction and institutional failure, not on any contradiction internal to capitalism. His closing warning is pointed: regional blocs such as LAFTA and the EEC may themselves endanger the wider multilateral order they claim to advance.
It was mainly due to the wholesale destruction of money, which in turn was largely the consequence of institutional weaknesses and incredibly poor policies, on the national and international level.
Setting aside Marx the revolutionary, sociologist, and prophet, this retrospective judges only Marx the economist — and finds the system wanting on every count that matters. Haberler locates the fatal defect in the value theory itself: once Volume III introduces equalized profit rates and prices of production, commodities no longer exchange at the labour values Volume I requires, so Böhm-Bawerk's old charge of internal contradiction still stands, now reinforced by Samuelson's analysis of the transformation problem. From logical failure he turns to practical sterility, arguing that even socialist planners improved only by smuggling back interest, scarcity pricing, and comparative cost. The prophecies fare no better: working-class immiseration, the imperialism thesis, and predictions of ever-deepening crises all founder against the economic record.
The assertion that in the capitalist countries real wages have a secular tendency to decline flies in the face of what everyone knows of economic history.
With De Gaulle challenging the dollar, Rueff calling for a return to gold at double its price, and sterling under siege in 1964, Haberler enters the Bretton Woods debate to attack two opposite errors: treating gold as monetary discipline and treating reserve creation as a substitute for adjustment. Money, he insists, is machinery for coordinating exchange, not a sacred parity; international arrangements earn their keep by preserving trade, convertibility, and price stability. The heart of the argument shifts the quarrel from liquidity to adjustment, showing how downward wage rigidity gives fixed exchange rates an inflationary bias and how the adjustable peg invites one-way speculation. His prescription is limited exchange-rate flexibility and conditional, ad hoc cooperation rather than automatic reserve creation.
As the 1963 BIS report remarked, liquidity must not only be sufficient but must also be capable of running out, because the ultimate sanction, a liquidity crisis, may be needed to bring governments to their senses.
Why do socialist economies, for all their proclaimed internationalism, trade so little and so cautiously? Haberler's answer, offered as candid speculations of a theorist, is that comparative cost identifies gains from trade but never realizes them; someone must go looking. Marginal analysis and shadow pricing can aid socialist calculation, yet they cannot supply the entrepreneurial discovery that foreign markets demand: unfamiliar demand, currency risk, contractual hazard, the real possibility of loss. Private merchants chase profit across borders; plan-bound managers, rewarded for fulfilment and punished for failure, stay inward-looking and nationalistic. The predicted result is trade aversion and undertrading, volumes far below the comparative-cost optimum, together with bilateralism, barter, and imports confined to unavoidable necessities. It is comparative advantage recast from a static doctrine into an institutional argument.
Nationalism has proved to be an extremely hardy plant.
A uniform tax on all imports plus an equal subsidy on all exports is, for commodity trade, identical to a currency devaluation, an equivalence Haberler accepts as an analytical benchmark and then spends the chapter refusing as policy. The device breaks the moment it meets institutions: it omits services and tourism, invites exemptions, and never stays uniform, sliding toward commodity-by-commodity and country-by-country discrimination and, eventually, exchange control. On the microeconomic side he wields Ricardo to reject the GATT distinction between border-adjustable indirect taxes and non-adjustable direct ones; what matters is whether a tax alters relative costs, not whether it is nominally shifted. Tracing the idea from Keynes's 1931 tariff-and-bounty proposal through Hicks, Triffin, and European VAT practice, he concludes that a valid model equivalence is no sound recommendation.
I conclude that the border tax on imports and tax refund on exports is an inferior, messy, wasteful, and inefficient substitute for exchange-rate adjustments.
Record American deficits piled up through the late 1960s, yet confidence in the dollar held—a puzzle Haberler and Willett resolve by arguing that the world had drifted onto a de facto dollar standard in which the currency was inconvertible into gold for large official sums, and that the very gap between the gold stock and dollar liabilities made mass conversion unthinkable. From this they draw the case for what they call benign neglect: because the United States cannot unilaterally devalue a currency everyone else pegs to, it should pursue domestic stability and curb inflation while leaving adjustment to surplus countries, which may accumulate dollars, appreciate, expand, or lower trade barriers. Written just before the August 1971 suspension of convertibility, the essay presses for modest exchange-rate flexibility—crawling pegs, wider bands, floating—over the distortions of capital and trade controls.
whenever a serious dilemma or conflict between the requirements of external and internal equilibrium arises, domestic policy objectives should take precedence over balance-of-payments considerations
Ninety days of frozen wages and prices gave Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 its drama, but Haberler asks the harder question of what happens once the freeze is lifted. A freeze, he warns, suspends visible price changes without touching demand, wage bargaining, or credibility; hold it too long and it breeds evasion, bureaucracy, and corruption. The essay's hinge is a distinction between two incomes policies: guideposts and controls that substitute official judgment for the market, and reforms that restore competition by curbing union privileges, revising Davis-Bacon and minimum-wage rules, ending strike subsidies, and opening the door to imports. Sustained inflation, he holds, is always monetary, yet monopoly unions can still force authorities to choose between validating wage push and accepting unemployment. Business monopoly, by contrast, produces mostly one-shot effects and matters far less to a continuing spiral.
Industrial monopolies or oligopolies are not much of a problem as far as inflation is concerned.
Aid to poor countries is laudable; producing it by attaching international reserve creation to development finance is not. That is the disciplined case Haberler mounts against the "Link" between IMF special drawing rights and assistance to less developed countries. Reserve allocation answers to payments, trade variability, and liquidity, he argues, while aid answers to income, wealth, and welfare; fusing the two would rationalize neither and turn every SDR decision into a distributive struggle. The Link is inherently inflationary, since reserves allocated for development are designed to be spent, and even the subtler non-inflationary version proposed by Karlik and Scitovsky would yield little. Aid should instead be voted openly through the budget, its burden made explicit rather than scattered by IMF quotas and balance-of-payments accidents - a tax lottery in place of a tax system.
This argument again mixes reserves and aid.
When Washington suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971, it exposed how deeply American inflation had become the world's problem, the theme of this 1973 essay, collected in Haberler's volume on inflation and business cycles. Because the dollar served as reserve and intervention currency, U.S. price rises under Vietnam and Great Society financing were transmitted abroad in amplified form, forcing Germany, Switzerland, and Austria to resist inflation they had not created. Haberler distinguishes a pure dollar crisis from a mark or yen crisis, locates the fundamental defect in the adjustable peg, and defends greater exchange-rate flexibility through managed floating. Only domestic monetary restraint, he insists, can end inflation itself, but floating spares the system disruptive one-way speculation.
But let me repeat, the compulsion to submit to imported inflation arises only under a regime of fixed exchanges and convertibility.