ABSTRACT
In two famous articles in the Economic Journal of 1937 Bertil Ohlin invented the concept of ‘The Stockholm School of Economics’. At this time John Maynard Keynes was the economist of the day and Ohlin was keen to present the Stockholm economists as a school who both stood close to and in fact anticipated many of Keynes’s ideas. That Keynes also stood in the forefront in the political discussion regarding how the present mass unemployment should be cured triggered Ohlin even more to put his name alongside Keynes; as always Ohlin was more a politician than a scientific economist. There is certainly an important grain of truth in Ohlin’s story, of course. As we will see, in policy terms, the Stockholm economists often came to the same conclusions as Keynes. However, at the same time it is certainly a misnomer only to see the ‘Stockholm School’ as some special kind of Keynesianism. In reality, it was something quite different and built on a quite different doctrinal heritage. Hence, to reduce it as such means in fact that we totally fail to understand what the Stockholm School instead was from a more historical and doctrinal point of view. While doing this I will rely on one of its most important figures, Gunnar Myrdal. Without doubt, he was the first within the school to outline the kind of sequence analysis which really lay at the heart of the Stockholm School.
