EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The emerging discipline of public economics in postwar France

Raphaël Fèvre and Thomas Mueller

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2023, vol. 30, issue 5, 739-763

Abstract: After the Second World War, optimal pricing in the public sector became an important topic internationally. The welfare enhancing properties of marginal pricing were a key concern, yet, the technical computation of marginal costs also proved difficult. It was unclear how to compute marginal costs, mainly in view of the discontinuities of the cost function. In the context of post-war reconstruction and of practically implementing a marginal pricing policy, this technical debate was closely linked in France to the “Calais traveller paradox” and the emergence of a new generation of engineer-economists contributing at the same time to the theoretical debate and to the practical implementation of marginal cost pricing. Maurice Allais and Marcel Boiteux, as well as Gabriel Dessus and Roger Hutter contributed to developing national solutions that also spread theoretical thinking internationally. This debate connects with the history of economic calculus and the rise of public economics, as well as the possibility of computing optimal welfare enhancing prices in the face of market failures.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2023.2248315 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:30:y:2023:i:5:p:739-763

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

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2023.2248315

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:30:y:2023:i:5:p:739-763