EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Adam Klug Memorial Lecture: Haberler versus Nurkse: The Case for Floating Exchange Rates as an Alternative to Bretton Woods?

Michael Bordo and Harold James

No 8545, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: From the perspective of the late 1930s and 1940s the dominant view was that the inter-war currency experience was a financial disaster. The view is perfectly encapsulated in the League of Nations' publication The Inter-war Currency Experience, the bulk of which was written by Ragnar Nurkse and published in 1944. It was also the view behind the Keynes and White plans for international monetary reform, which culminated in the Bretton Woods conference and the establishment of the adjustable peg par value system buttressed by capital controls. An alternative view to Nurkse was posited by Gottfried Haberler in Prosperity and Depression, also commissioned by the League of Nations and published in 1937. In Prosperity and Depression Haberler made a strong intellectual case for floating exchange rates as a mechanism to insulate countries from the transmission of booms and depressions. In this paper we consider the views of Nurkse and Haberler on fixed and floating exchange rates and consider why Haberler's approach was not taken seriously until 1950s. Our main conclusion is that Haberler himself failed to offer a sufficiently clear blueprint for his approach at the time, although he did come to it by 1953. Moreover his views were counter to the ascending Keynesian paradigm.

JEL-codes: B31 E22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba and nep-ifn
Note: IFM ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Arnon, Arie and Warren L. Young. (eds.) The Open Economy MacroModel: Past, Present, and Future. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8545.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:8545

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8545

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8545