Karl Gunnar Persson 1943–2016

Karl Gunnar Persson, former Head of the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, founding president of the European Historical Economics Society, one of the founding editors of the European Review of Economic History, and fellow of the Royal Danish Academy died in Siena, Italy on 14 September 2016. He is survived by his sons, Hannes and Mårten.

Gunnar obtained his PhD in Economic History from Lund University at a time, like the present, when tenured positions were thin on the ground. For some years he worked as an editor and journalist and played an active part in the Swedish public debate. He himself described these years as great fun, but taking time away from his research. During that time he also linked up with a group of young left-wing Danish macroeconomists before he finally ended up in Denmark as an associate professor at RUC, Roskilde University Centre. After a short stay there he moved to the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen in 1975 as an associate professor.

Gunnar’s earliest work, including his doctoral dissertation (Persson, 1972), was mostly about social mobility, which reflected his early interest in societal issues. In terms of economic history, however, one of his earliest and most important contributions was his well-cited monograph entitled Pre-industrial Economic Growth (Persson, 1988). A proud ‘card-carrying anti-Malthusian’ until the end, he argued against the naïve Malthusian model, demonstrating that, if there was technological progress, there could be positive population growth and income above subsistence. Thus, the slow economic and population growth of pre-industrial societies was determined by the rate of (Smithian) technological progress offset by the rate of the (Malthusian) diminishing returns on labour. He also suggested ways of inferring growth in per capita income using Engel’s Law and the share of non-food producers in the economy (Persson, 1992), but was happy when recent data collection efforts often seemed to support his early conjectures.

In 1999 he was made full professor at the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen. He initially taught labour economics and social policy, but soon found his calling in teaching and writing on economic history. In his own words he felt his reception in that discipline was like that of a cat among pigeons. That feeling cannot have lasted for very long, however. He earned growing respect among his colleagues in various disciplines, even those seemingly remote from his own. He was never going to embrace general equilibrium theory, but he sympathised wholeheartedly with the efforts of a group of professors to internationalise the Department.

His contribution to the study of economic history in Europe was to become almost legendary, as, together with a group of other European economic historians, he began to react to the almost total dominance of American scholars in modern quantitative economic history. Their considerations were debated at various informal meetings, but it was the launching of the European Historical Economics Society at a meeting in Copenhagen 1991 which marked the start of a new era. Gunnar became the first president and among the founding fathers were James Foreman-Peck, Leandro Prados, Jaime Reis and Gianni Toniolo. Even without regular meetings the efforts of this group and others resulted in the founding of a new academic journal in 1997: the European Review of Economic History with Tim Hatton, Leandro Prados and Vera Zamagni as the first editors. It was a daring project given the competition from other English-language journals in the field, but it was and continues to be a success. The EREH helped encourage Europeans and people from other parts of the world to publish their research in modern economic history for a larger audience. Moreover, the journal stands in high international regard within the field, and its importance for many of us cannot be overstated.

In the 1990s much of Gunnar’s research concerned market integration, including another important monograph, Grain markets in Europe 1500–1900 (Persson, 1999). He argued that prices became more stable as markets integrated and grain flowed from surplus areas to deficit areas. He subsequently took this topic further by investigating the workings of the Law of One Price, demonstrating that the speed and quality of information transmission caused a faster return to equilibrium, and thus smaller deadweight losses to economies (Ejrnæs & Persson, 2000). In this way, he calculated the benefits of improvements in market integration, such as the commercial press and the introduction of the telegraph. Gunnar’s work on this coincided with the integration of his home in Malmö, Sweden with Copenhagen, as the Øresund Bridge, after many years of heated debate and then more years of construction, was opened in 2000, obviating his previous commute by ferry. Later, the new Triangeln station close to his flat was opened in 2010. A somewhat sad irony, however, is that shortly before he passed away, passport controls were introduced by Sweden in 2015 as a reaction to the refugee crisis of that time. These he detested, and they caused a not inconsiderable increase in his commuting time, although he still made regular trips to Copenhagen, for example to attend seminars.

Gunnar also contributed massively to the teaching of economic history, not only through his classes at the University of Copenhagen (including a popular summer school), but also with the publication of his textbook An Economic History of Europe (Persson, 2010; 2nd edition with Paul Sharp from 2015). Based on decades of teaching experience, he chose to abandon the traditional chronological approach to economic history, and instead based the book on themes such as pre-industrial growth, money, banking, trade and others. It enjoyed instant international popularity and was translated into several languages.

At the Department of Economics, Gunnar was good at sharing his ideas with others, including people within fields such as macroeconomics and development economics, and he sparred successfully with a young micro-econometrician, Mette Ejrnæs. He helped establish a forum for interaction across disciplines called Macroeconomics and the Historical Record (MEHR), which continues to organise a successful seminar series.

Gunnar was proclaimed Professor Emeritus in 2013. Thereafter, no doubt inspired by an increasing international focus and interest at his department, Gunnar revived some earlier themes from his research. For example, he was working with Mette Ejrnæs on historical demography and particularly fertility control within marriage before modern contraception: an invective against the Malthusian idea that people mechanically increased their fertility with increasing levels of income. He was also working with Christian Groth on a more formal approach to estimating income growth using Engel’s Law, finding that pre-industrial Britain exhibited a secular rise in the standard of living. He also looked forward to a possible third edition of his textbook, which was to extend its coverage to topics such as the Neolithic Revolution and ancient economies.

As a colleague Gunnar was great fun. He had a sense of humour and enjoyed trading gossip without being mean. His office door was always open for us to pop in. He extended his hospitality to his home in Malmö, where he and his late wife Monica brought people together from all over the world. The contacts made on these occasions have been long lasting and are an important part of his legacy. He will be greatly missed by many within the field of economic history and beyond.