Looking for the rationale of the instability principle in Harrod’s Essay in dynamic theory: who is adjusting what?

Rodolphe Dos Santos Ferreira

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2020, vol. 27, issue 4, 549-563

Abstract: Instability of the warranted growth path, an important property for business cycle theory, is central to Harrod’s Essay. It is persuasively presented as the consequence of moving from statics (where stability is viewed as the normal case) to dynamics. How exactly? The paper suggests two reasons. The first lies in attributing to demanders (firms as investors) rather than to suppliers (firms as producers) the main response to market imbalances. The second results from the insidious introduction of an extrapolative component of expectations in Harrod’s dynamic approach, replacing levels by trends and confining them to a single point in time.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2020.1768424 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Looking for the rationale of the instability principle in Harrod’s Essay in dynamic theory: who is adjusting what? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:27:y:2020:i:4:p:549-563

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2020.1768424

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().