ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with conceptions of development and the structure of production and discusses market forms, employment, money, public finance and general and international policy, in each case, how the parties involved in the debate formulate their views. Western histories of economic thought mostly seek to reconstruct the history of the discovery of economic insights and, for the more recent period, of contributions to economic theory. The Yantie lun contains more on the philosophy of money than on the practice of coinage or the mechanism of monetary exchange. E. Mende points out that the economic chapters in the histories of Chinese dynasties deal with the following sequence of subjects: demography, agriculture, land tenure, silk production, state granaries, transport by the state, the monopoly of salt and other forms of taxation, controls of markets and prices and monetary matters.
