ABSTRACT

The reciprocal influences between international trade and economic development, considered in both their historical and theoretical aspects, has characterized all of Arthur Lewis’s seminal contributions to our discipline. His most influential single contribution has undoubtedly been the famous model of economic development with unlimited supplies of labor. This model, however, at least in the form in which it has been most popular, is a closed one in which international trade is not explicitly introduced. It is true that the second part of the Lewis (1954) article does contain a most ingenious and interesting trade model, but it is a basically different construction, a static three-commodity, two-country Ricardian system, rather than an ‘opening up’ of the dynamic analysis of capital accumulation in a dual economy that constitutes the first part.