International Trade and Economic Growth in Open Economics: The Classical Dynamics of Hume, Smith, Ricardo and Malthus

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`John Berdell's International Trade and Economic Growth in Open Economies is a tour de force. The author has examined the contributions under the title's rubric of Hume, Smith, Ricardo and Malthus. He draws on their original writings which he knows intimately and the vast secondary literature which he deploys with judgement and common sense.

He teases out their conjectures on various aspects of the problems analysed, then uses his fine modelling and simulation skills to see how robust their ideas are. He relates his findings to very modern developments in the theory of trade and growth. In doing so, he demonstrates that a thorough knowledge of the contributions of past greats is indispensable to an understanding and illumination of the economic, political and social problems of the modern world.

Not that he is uncritical of his predecessors and the commentators on them; rather he is sympathetically critical and subtle in drawing out their contributions and specifying their approaches in such a way as to make modern-type modelling possible and powerful. Berdell's book is a fine example of why a knowledge of what went before greatly enriches our ability to understand, not only the past but also the present, and to design plausible policies for present-day ills.' - G.C.

Harcourt, Jesus College, Cambridge, UK In this enlightening book, John Berdell addresses the widely-held belief that classical economics distanced itself from policy issues and public debates regarding the effects of international trade on economic growth in advanced economies. He argues, through a detailed consideration of the evolution and structure of Hume's, Smith's, Ricardo's and Malthus' analyses, that it is not only contemporary international economic theory which takes account of these issues.

Berdell uses a series of non-linear dynamic models to illustrate and analyze important aspects of each author's discussion of the interactions between trade and growth. The findings are then extended to create a comparison of the classical models with recent empirical research in this area. Berdell suggests that John Stuart Mill's plan to synthesize and extend Hume's, Smith's and Ricardo's analysis of commercial society was rendered intractable by the limitations of Hume's associationalist psychology.

This work will be of great interest to both historians of economic ideas and economists concerned with modeling the interactions between growth and international trade.