ABSTRACT
The Royal Swedish Academy of Science awarded the Nobel Prize to Bertil Ohlin in 1977 – jointly with James Meade – for a ‘pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements’.2 Ohlin’s contributions to international economics have been surveyed and evaluated by Caves (1978) on the occasion of the award, and by Samuelson (1982) in a commemorative paper on the occasion of Ohlin’s death in 1979. Caves’s and especially Samuelson’s claims that Ohlin made original contributions on par with Eli F. Heckscher to the Heckscher-Ohlin theory can be disputed. I will argue that Ohlin received the fundamental ideas from Heckscher and that Ohlin’s contribution to international trade theory was to recognize the revolutionary character of these ideas, integrate them with general equilibrium, neo-classical price theory, and to increase our understanding of Heckscher’s model by making it more general and by applying it to a large number of cases of empirical relevance. This was no lesser achievement. The original part of Ohlin’s contributions is the analysis of international capital movements, in particular of balance of payments adjustment, where he integrated real and monetary aspects and used his own concept of buying-power as a powerful tool.
