Roy Harrod and the Keynesian revolution: his newly published correspondence

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Notes

This and subsequent page references are to Harrod (2003) except where another work is specifically referred to.

This is now included in Keynes, vol. XXIX, pp. 123 – 9.

Robertson drew Harrod's attention to Pigou (1935, chs X and XXIII) and Ramsey (1928).

Laidler has suggested that Harrod had essentially the same insights when he, Hicks and Meade ‘presented versions of what was, at heart, the same simultaneous-equations model’ at the September 1936 Conference of the Econometric Society. (Laidler 1999: 304) Harrod's paper, like Hicks's, was published in Econometrica in 1937 (and Meade's (1937) in the Review of Economic Studies). Hicks's paper, which referred equally to Keynes and his classical predecessors, received overwhelming attention because of its clarity, and the celebrated diagram.

Mill (1848) Book IV, ch.4, ‘Of the tendency of profits to a minimum’, and ch.5, ‘Consequences of the tendency of profits to a minimum’.

In Eltis (1998) it is shown that there is a close connection between Harrod's fundamental growth equation, Marx's ‘Scheme of expanded reproduction’ (1867 – 94, Vol.2, ch.21) and Quesnay's detailed account of the growth the eighteenth century French economy could achieve (Quesnay and Riquetti 1763, ch.9: 286 – 92).

See Rampa, Stella and Thirlwall (1998) for a collection of articles that commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the Trade Cycle.