ABSTRACT
Economic thought in Atlantic Canada can be described as economics in the context of action. That could mean the economics of planning for independent or, at least, self-paced growth, or the economics of planning for adjustment to external economic developments; that is, planning for maximization in a position of dependency. For over two and a half centuries in the Maritimes there has been some of both, with a great deal of the descriptive groundwork that is the pre-requisite of planning. After the failure of agricultural settlement in Newfoundland in the seventeenth century there were no further attempts at independent economic growth there. When Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949, the Maritimes were about to enter their second period of planning for relatively independent selfpaced growth. At some point in the 1970s the Maritimes reverted to planning for maximization in a position of dependency, so the economics of all of Atlantic Canada again became of one kind.
