保罗·罗森斯坦·罗丹(Paul Rosenstein-Rodan,1902-1985):发展经济学先驱人物之一,平衡增长理论的先驱
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Paul Rosenstein-Rodan was an Austrian economist born in Kraków, who was trained in the Austrian tradition at Vienna. His early contributions to economics were in pure economic theory —- on marginal utility, complementarity, hierarchical structures of wants and the ever-Austrian issue of time.
Rosenstein-Rodan emigrated to Britain in 1930, and taught at UCL and then at LSE until 1947. He then moved to the World Bank, before moving on to MIT, where he was a professor from 1953 to 1968. He subsequently moved to Texas and Boston University.
He was the author of a theory of the 'Big Push Model' in which he compared an underdeveloped economy to an airplane on a runway. An airplane, before it flies, has to gain a certain velocity in order to take off. Similarly, an economy was able to function along Adam Smith's free market principles only when it gained momentum stimulated by planned large-scale investment programmes.
Rosenstein-Rodan's famous 1943 article argued that industrialization could be regarded as the "initiator" of economic development. His thesis, based on Young's famous 1928 paper, argued that given increasing returns to scale, government-induced industrialization was possible. Credited with having "initiated" the theory of economic development, Rosenstein- Rodan's future work exhibited his continued concern with this issue.